2 reactions
What’s your favorite mathematician “origin story”
Not really an origin story, but some story/anecdote revolving around a mathematician. Could be early sings of genius, funny story, or some weird quirk about them.
Mine is probably the story of when George Dantzig was late to class. Basically he was in his first year of PhD program in Statistics at UC Berkeley, and he was 10 minutes late to a class on statistical theory, in a rush, he saw two problems in the blackboard, thought they were the homework for that week, and jotted them down in his notebook for later.
He recalled that the homework problems were “quite tougher than usual” but he got them done. He turns them in to his professor Jerzy Neyman, who reveals to him that those weren’t homework problems Dantzig had solved……They were two open research problems in statistical theory surrounding hypothesis testing, that Neyman wanted to introduce to the class as potential areas of research.
Neyman ends up telling Dantzig that those two “homework problems” could be the first two chapters of his thesis and the rest his history.
What’s yours?
#science
Not really an origin story, but some story/anecdote revolving around a mathematician. Could be early sings of genius, funny story, or some weird quirk about them.
Mine is probably the story of when George Dantzig was late to class. Basically he was in his first year of PhD program in Statistics at UC Berkeley, and he was 10 minutes late to a class on statistical theory, in a rush, he saw two problems in the blackboard, thought they were the homework for that week, and jotted them down in his notebook for later.
He recalled that the homework problems were “quite tougher than usual” but he got them done. He turns them in to his professor Jerzy Neyman, who reveals to him that those weren’t homework problems Dantzig had solved……They were two open research problems in statistical theory surrounding hypothesis testing, that Neyman wanted to introduce to the class as potential areas of research.
Neyman ends up telling Dantzig that those two “homework problems” could be the first two chapters of his thesis and the rest his history.
What’s yours?
#science
| 18,000 mlx | |
| 16 | |
| 2 |