My grandfather graduated with a man named George Dantzig, a famous mathematician. A story about his fellow ’36 graduate became quite famous in the movie Good Will Hunting. “Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they “seemed to be a little harder than usual”, but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that the “homework” problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. He had prepared one of Dantzig’s solutions for publication in a mathematical journal. This story began to spread and was used as a motivational lesson demonstrating the power of positive thinking. Over time, some facts were altered, but the basic story was used as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.
On October 18, 1976 President Gerald Ford presented Dantzig with the President’s National Medal of Science. The award was given “For inventing linear programming and discovering methods that led to wide-scale scientific and technical applications to important problems in logistics, scheduling, and network optimization, and to the use of computers in making efficient use of the mathematical theory.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
Deep Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life 