Maybe you don’t recognize his name, but you’ve probably heard of him. The story goes that a students shows up late for class, sees two problems up on the board, and copies them down thinking that they are his assignment. A couple of days later, the student shows up at the professor’s office, apologizing for returning his homework late, explaining that the assignment was more difficult than usual.
It turns out, however, that those two problems weren’t homework. They were two unsolved problems of the day. That student, as you have probably figured out by now, was George Dantzig.
Huh. . . I think I remember the Simplex method from Operations Analysis class in college . . . weird to think that someone invented it; and that he was living in this century.