Picture this: you show up late to class, notice a couple of equations on the blackboard, and assume they are the homework for the day. You quickly copy them down, head home, and work them out. The next day, you bring the solutions to your professor, who looks at them and says, Do you realize what you have done with your work? You have solved two equations for which the solution was not yet known. That's the legend of Dantzig in a nutshell. But did it really happen?
It's rare for a mathematician to become as well known as a rock star or a Hollywood actor. George Dantzig, though not as famous as Mick Jagger or Bruce Willis, has the distinction of having his life inspire what many believe is nothing more than an urban legend.
Dantzig was born into a family of immigrants. His father, Tobias Dantzig, was a fairly well-known Russian mathematician who had studied with Henri Poincaré in Paris. He married Anja Ourisson, a linguistics student of Polish origin at the Sorbonne. The family had few financial resources but a solid intellectual background. They emigrated to the United States and settled there permanently.
George's middle name was Bernard, chosen in honor of George Bernard Shaw. One of his brothers, also a mathematician, was named Henry, in honor of Henri Poincaré, which gives a sense of the figures the Dantzig family admired. The elder Dantzig strongly influenced young George's calling for mathematics. He gave me thousands of geometry problems while I was in high school. The mental work needed to solve them was, without a doubt, the best gift my father gave me. Solving all those problems during my adolescence—when my brain was still developing—contributed more than anything else to my analytical powers, George once said. And it was that analytical power that later gave rise to the events that became The Legend of Dantzig.
The Legend of Dantzig
In 1939, a 25-year-old George Dantzig arrived late to one of his classes. The professor in charge was Jerzy Neyman—if you've studied statistics at university, you might know him from the Neyman-Pearson lemma—and he had written a couple of statistical problems on the blackboard. These problems were incomplete, meaning the solutions were not shown. George assumed they were the day's assignment and hurriedly copied them before class ended. When the class was over, he went home and set to work on the equations. As he would later recall, those two equations seemed to be a little more difficult than normal, but he managed to solve them in a couple of days. At the next class, he handed the results to Neyman and forgot about the matter. Six weeks later, his professor, visibly excited, paid him a visit. Do you realize what you have done? he said. For a few seconds, Dantzig didn't know whether he was about to be congratulated or scolded for some terrible mistake. In reality, as Neyman explained, he had solved two complex problems that no one had been able to solve before.
Neyman even arranged for one of Dantzig's solutions to be prepared for publication in a mathematics journal. Years later, when another mathematician, Abraham Wald, who was working on these problems, published a paper related to the second equation Dantzig had solved, he acknowledged Dantzig's work and included him as a coauthor. Understandably, the story of George began to spread and even became a motivational lesson, an example of the importance of positive thinking. Many self-help book authors referenced this story with phrases like no problem is impossible or you just have to believe you are capable, overlooking the small detail that Dantzig had a solid mathematical background without which he surely couldn't have solved those problems. The anecdote was repeated so often, and the facts so altered and exaggerated, that four or five decades later it had become another urban myth. Fortunately, Dantzig lived a long life—he died in 2005—and took care to clarify several times that the story was true.
For more details, see George Dantzig.
