Good George Dantzig

In the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon plays the title character, a young man from a poor background of abuse and under appreciation.  At the beginning of the movie Will is employed as a janitor at MIT.

MIT Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard) has discovered the existence of a mysterious genius who sneaks in at night to solve math problems of ever-increasing difficulty which Lambeau leaves on the board at night.

The Prof walks in one evening to discover the janitor working out a problem that took Lambeau and his colleagues two years to solve.

The story of a young man coming from nowhere to outperform the most respected authorities in their own field of expertise is a source of pleasure for many and a bit of justification for some people, like me, in the profession of helping troubled youth.  But we all know it could never really happen, right?

Right, except that it actually did…sort of.

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First let me burst your bubble; I am not the inspiration for Will Hunting and no one who knows me would confuse me with him.  However, I did experience some similar situations. 

I was frequently bored in school and acted out or clowned around to relieve my tedium.  This often left me at odds with teachers who rightfully desired order in their classrooms.  That, plus the fact that my lackadaisical attitude toward the required study often produced barely passing grades, must not have given educators a high estimation of my intelligence.  Some even seemed to think that trying to encourage me was a total waste of their time.

One incident I’ll mention came late in my grade school career.  I won’t give the teacher’s name because I bear her no ill-will (no pun intended).  We were studying genetics in science class and specifically discussing hereditary dominance. 

Gregor Mendel’s research on garden peas laid the groundwork for what would become the field of genetics.  You know: a tall pea and a short pea crossed to produce only tall offspring because the tall gene was dominant. 

Mendel didn’t study rats but we also talked about how a black rat and a white rat produced all black offspring.

Well, the rat scenario piqued my interest.  I guess mainly because I don’t like peas.

Anyway, one day after school I was mowing my neighbor’s yard and found where a stray dog had taken up residence in her hedge.  A litter of puppies snuggled with the friendly dog.  I squatted to play with the squirming mass and began to think about what I saw. 

After finishing the lawn I went home to open my science book with renewed interest.  The information I gleaned from the tome left me unsatisfied as the answers it contained did not agree with my own theories formed while observing the black, white, and spotted pups.

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Seeking resolution to my quandary I took my seat in school a bit more eagerly than normal the next day.  Then I made my way up to the teacher’s desk at the first opportunity.  I told her about observing the pups and shared with her my theories on incomplete dominance as evidenced by the litter of pups.

She told me flippantly that black is always dominant and sent me back to my seat.

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Now, my dismissive teacher didn’t crush my curiosity but she did stifle any nascent interest I had gained for paying attention in class.  Instead I returned to biding my time, losing myself to musings about areas interesting to me, eagerly waiting for the end of the day so I could get home to study my dog-eared set of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia or hitch a ride to the town library where I haunted the aisles filled with books for grown-up readers rather than children.

To be fair to the teacher, I’m not trying to say that I was smarter than her or that she didn’t actually know the answer.  It’s possible that she was just trying to quiet one kid so that she could teach the majority.

But I am trying to say I needed a different type of tutelage.  You see, I had learned more on my own than in her class because I had not believed that what she taught was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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Back in 1939 a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class and found two problems written on the board.  Chagrined that he hadn’t gotten there in time to hear the homework instructions he wrote the equations down and took them home.

The problems were frustrating to George Bernard Dantzig but he kept plugging away and eventually unraveled them both.

In Dantzig’s own words, “I apologized to (the professor – Jerzy) Neyman for taking so long to do the homework – the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual.  I asked him if he still wanted it.  He told me to throw it on his desk.  

“About six weeks later, (my wife) Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door.  It was Neyman.  He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: ‘I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers.  Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.’ For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about.  To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.”

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What most people take away from the story is that Dantzig solved the theorems because he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be able to.  I think the fact is more like Will Hunting’s story but the “solved it because I thought I could” scenario is a good one too.

However, some other people seem to agree with my opinions about Dantzig’s ability.  There is some evidence that the writer(s) of Good Will Hunting used George’s experience as inspiration for the movie.

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I could find no reference to what George Bernard Dantzig thought about the movie (He passed away in 2005 at the age of 90.) or even if he ever saw it at all.  Although I admit to being curious, it doesn’t really matter a lot to me.  More important to me, I hope teachers learned that no kid, despite his grades or his behaviors, is a waste of time.  I hope they learned from both the movie and George Dantzig’s story that they should put out the effort to reach every kid.  Maybe they can be the one who stimulates a kid’s curiosity and desire to learn.

Who knows, that kid could turn out to be the writer of a wildly popular and thought provoking blog.

Hey, I’m a great man, even if it is only in my own mind, but I did get encouragement from some of my teachers, and I am eternally grateful to those patient and enthusiastic educators.

May they be forever blessed.

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