George Dantzig was a prominent mathematician who during college solved 2 famously unsolved maths problems.
While this is remarkable in itself, it’s the story behind how he came to solve them which truly makes you wonder.
As Dr. Dantzig recalled years later, he arrived late for class one day and saw two problems on the blackboard that he assumed were homework assignments. He copied them down, took them home and solved them after a few days. “The problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual,” he said.
On a Sunday morning six weeks later, an excited Neyman banged on his student’s front door, eager to tell him that the homework problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.
Dr. Dantzig had assumed these problems were homework, implying that they were indeed solvable.
Did this belief help him to solve these problems? Or at the very least, cause him to persist with them because he believed there was an answer?
Or perhaps it’s best to consider this from the other perspective – had Dr. Dantzig arrived early for class that day, would he have accepted the belief that they were unsolvable and not persisted with them?
Some people would love the challenge of solving an unsolved problem. But in this instance it’s quite remarkable that Dr. Dantzig applied himself without an awareness that there was anything particularly different about these problems – they were just part of the standard curriculum.
So therein lies the question.
To achieve what you want in life, what beliefs do you hold which you could shift?
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