HOLY COW! HISTORY: A tardy student turned genius

By J. Mark Powell
Posted 6/15/25

Always be on time, we are taught. Promptness is, after all, a virtue. But one time, being late paid off spectacularly for one tardy student, and we are all the better today for it. Here’s how …

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HOLY COW! HISTORY: A tardy student turned genius

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Always be on time, we are taught. Promptness is, after all, a virtue. But one time, being late paid off spectacularly for one tardy student, and we are all the better today for it. Here’s how it happened.

George Dantzig was a math whiz. We’re talking scary smart with numbers. Growing up as a kid in the 1920s, long before personal calculators were ever dreamed up, he figured out difficult problems the old-fashioned way with pencil, paper and brainpower.

Born into a family of Jewish academics (his parents had met as college students at the University of Paris, with the dad going on to become a mathematician and the mom a linguist at the Library of Congress), the boy followed in their scholastic footsteps.

He earned his undergrad and then his master’s degrees in mathematics and physics, then did a two-year stint as a junior statistician at the incredibly fun-sounding Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But academia still tugged at his heart, and by 1939, he was back in the classroom, this time at the University of California-Berkeley.        

Dantzig had a reputation for being a diligent student, often studying late into the night. One particular time late that year, he worked far longer than usual, and he overdid it. That caused the very same crisis college students still experience today: he overslept.

Throwing on his clothes as fast as he could, as he dashed across campus, he thought he could at least catch the final portion of his statistics class and explain what happened to his professor.

But when Dantzig entered the room 30 minutes late, it was empty. Two math problems were written on a blackboard. Figuring it to be the homework assignment, he diligently copied them down and returned to his room.

“They were a little harder than usual,” he admitted later, but he jumped into both with his usual scholarly gusto. In fact, he did little else but work on them for the next few days. When the homework was finished, he turned it in, along with a sheepish apology for having missed class.

A while later, there was knocking on the door. Dantzig opened it to find his instructor, Prof. Jerzy Splawa-Neyman, bubbling over in nervous excitement.

“That wasn’t a homework assignment,” he explained. The professor had written out two of the most intricately complex unanswered problems in the field. Their solution had evaded researchers for decades. “And you just solved them both!”

It was an accidental success, and it launched Dantzig’s amazing career. His discoveries had major benefits, both practical and academic. They helped shape the course of modern mathematics and had a profound influence on early computer research. If you’re reading this story online, Dantzig was one of a large group of people whose work helped make that technology possible.

He put his talent to use in the Army Air Forces during World War II, where he served in planning and logistics. Eventually becoming a professor at Stanford, his work was used to develop tools that revolutionized the optimization of large-scale systems.

The capstone of his career came on Oct. 18, 1976, when President Gerald Ford presented him with the prestigious National Medal of Science.

It was a long and distinguished academic journey that not only yielded many valuable results but also inspired hundreds of future researchers.

And George Dantzig owed it all to oversleeping and mistaking those two examples of unsolved problems on the blackboard for homework.

Have comments, questions or suggestions you’d like to share with Mark? Message him at jmp.press@gmail.com.       

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