There is a story about an American student who was once late for a couple on the Internet and, having accepted two open mathematical problems for homework on the board, solved them. We checked whether this happened.

Here is what is reported in the popular network text: “In 1939, the 25-year-old mathematician George Danzig studied at the University of California. Once he was a couple of statistics for 20 minutes. He quietly entered, sat down at the desk and turned his head, trying to understand what he missed. The conditions of two tasks were recorded on the board. “Yeah,” Danzig thought, “clearly, this is apparently homework for the next pair.” The student rewrote the tasks in the notebook and began to listen to the professor.

At home, he regretted three times that he was late. The tasks were really difficult. Danzig thought that he probably missed something important to solve them. However, there was nothing to do. After a few days of hard work, he still solved these problems. Satisfied, he jumped up to the professor and gave the notebook.

Professor - his name was Jerzy Neumann, if anyone is interested - absentmindedly accepted the task: yes, they say, good. He somehow could not immediately remember that he did not ask students anything like that. When after some time he still looked at what the student brought him, his eyes just climbed on his forehead. He recalled that at the beginning of one of the lectures he really told students the conditions of these two tasks. Two insoluble tasks! Two tasks that the professor himself could not solve, but also the rest of the outstanding minds of that time. However, Danzig simply listened to that part of the lecture, which spoke of the insolubleness of these tasks. And he decided them.

Sometimes you can make the impossible. If only do not convince yourself that this is impossible is impossible. ”

This motivational story is quite popular in social networks such as Facebook (many hundred reposts), ""VKontakte" And Telegramas well as on the site anekdot.ru. Famous LJ-blogger Mi3ch It adds that it was used in the movie "Clever Wall Hunting." In the West, history often goes in the form city legend Without mentioning the name Mathematics.

Who is the defendants of this story? A native of Bessarabia and a specialist in mathematical statistics Professor Hedgehog Numan (not to be confused with another outstanding mathematician emigrant John von Neumann) He really worked at the University of California since 1938, and since 1955 he headed the corresponding department. Later, according to the British Encyclopedia, he and his graduates organized a real world center in the city of Berkeley to study this section of mathematics.

No less famous and George Danzig -Creator of the algorithm for solving problems with a sympoleg method and one of the founders of linear programming. The first thing that can catch your eye when reading our history is what he is called in it with a 25-year-old student. In fact, at the age of 22, he received a bachelor of mathematics and physicists at the University of Maryland, a year later he became a master at the University of Michigan and even managed to work for two years in the US labor statistics office. He is to Neuman asked In 1939, already in the framework of work on the doctoral.

What happened next? About this almost half a century later, in 1986, George Bernard Danzig himself told interview College Mathematics Journal. Here is what he said: “This happened due to the fact that once in my first year in Berkeley I was late for the lecture of Neumann. There were two tasks on the board, which, as I suggested, were homework. I rewrote them. A few days later I apologized to Neumann because I had done homework for so long - the tasks turned out to be a little more complicated than usual. I asked if he needed my decisions. He told me to throw them on the table. I did this reluctantly: his table was littered with such a bunch of papers that I was afraid to lose my homework forever. About six weeks later, on Sunday, at about 8 a.m. [my wife] Anne and I was woke up by a knock on the front door. It was Neumann. He ran with papers in his hands, all excited: "I just wrote a preface to one of your articles. Read it so that I could immediately send the article to the publication." For a minute, I could not understand what he was talking about. In short, the tasks from the board that I decided, thinking that this was homework, turned out to be two famous unresolved tasks according to statistics. I immediately suspected that something was wrong with them. A year later, when I was worried about the topic of my dissertation, Neumann only shrugged, saying that I would put both tasks in the folder and he would accept them like my dissertation. ”

Shortly before the interview Danzig I learned The fact that his story turned into a city legend: “The other day, Don Knut called me during a morning walk (the famous programming theoretician Donald Knut. - approx. Auth.), Passing by on his bike. He is my colleague in Stanford. He stopped and said: "Hello, George, I was recently in Indiana and heard a sermon about you in the church. Did you know that you have influenced the Christians of the Midwest?" I looked at him, amazed. “After the preaching,” he continued, “the priest came up and asked me if I know George Danzig from Stanford, because that was the name of the man about whom his preaching was.”

The origin of this sermon is connected with another Lutheran priest, the Monk Schuler (Danzig's spelling; in fact, the surname is written as Shuller. - Approx. Aut.) From Crystal Cathedral In Los Angeles. He shared with me his ideas about positive thinking, and I told him my story about homework and dissertation. A few months later, I received a letter from him with a request to allow me to include my story in a book about the power of the positive thinking that he wrote. The version published by Schuler contains a number of distortions and exaggeration, but is generally true. The moral of his sermon was as follows: if I knew that this was not a homework, but two well -known unresolved tasks on statistics, I would probably not have thought positively, would fall into despondency and would never have decided them. ”

Really, History of George Danzig, which was told in his book by the famous televaller Robert Shuller, contains many significant inaccuracies. In particular, Schuller Danzig was late not for a regular lecture, but to the final exam, and decided eight ordinary tasks on the spot, but two insoluble ones (he still did not know about it) asked him to give him a house. Moreover, in this version, Danzig, for some reason attributed to Stanford’s physical faculty, coped with only one of two difficult tasks, to which the nameless professor allegedly replied: “Even Einstein could not reveal their secret.” After an interview with 1986, the author’s version of the case with Danzig has gained no less popularity and to some extent replaced the version of the preacher: for example, it is precisely it that can be found in our days in a number motivational books. Both legends are mentioned in "Encyclopedia of American folklore". And, indeed, countsthat on its basis, a plot of a popular film was built on its basis "Cleverman Will Hunting" With Matt Damon in the title role.