Possible and Impossible
I heard this story about George Bernard Dantzig who was a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1939.
George Dantzig arrived late for a statistics class and found two problems written on the blackboard. He assumed they had been assigned for homework and copied them down. He worked very hard to solve those problems but they were very difficult to solve. He still tried to solve them and finally succeeded. He called his professor to apologize as it took him long to solve the problems and asked if he can still submit the homework. The professor told him to throw it on his desk. George Dantzig did so reluctantly because he worked so hard to solve those problems and the professor’s desk was covered with such a heap of papers that he feared his homework would be lost there forever.
A few weeks later, one Sunday morning he was awakened by someone banging on his front door. It was his professor Neyman. The professor 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 George Dantzig had no idea what he was talking about. Later he found out that the problems on the blackboard that he had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics.
It’s good that he did not know that those problems were unsolvable. If he had known, he would not have tried or would not have been able to solve them.
I wish that no one told us what is possible and what is impossible. Till one man, Roger Banister, succeeded in running one mile in four minutes, no one would have imagined running so fast. Once people knew that it was possible, about 200 people did it within a year.