Did you ever hear the true story that Good Will Hunting was based on? Being from the Boston area, I’ve heard a few. The guy wasn’t a janitor, but he was taking classes at Harvard extension. Or maybe he was a grad student who accidentally solved some mathematical mystery. Or he was based on some douchebag prodigy who never amounted to anything.
There’s not enough crypto in the world for Matt Damon to verify, but we can speculate.
Today’s Moment of Science… the real Will Hunting(s), maybe.
Imagine getting to class late, jotting down what you presume to be math homework problems off the board, and thinking ‘strange, I didn’t remember putting the difficulty settings to go-fuck-yourself.’ But you’re in grad school and goddamnit, that means working this shit out. It’s not like they’d assign something unsolvable to students, right? You take a few extra days, curse the very sperm that spunked your professor into existence, and pass in this horseshit late.
The year was 1939, and it was George Dantzig’s first year of grad school at Berkeley. Those weren’t homework problems on the board; they were two problems previously considered to be ‘unsolvable’ in statistics. Six weeks later, his professor informed Dantzig that he’d written an introduction for ‘one of (his) papers,’ which confused Dantzig because he didn’t realize he’d written a paper.
Dantzig said the problems “seemed to be a little harder than usual.”
When it came time to put together a thesis, his advisor told him to simply throw those two problems in a binder and call it a day. I’m not sure how his thesis defense went, but I hope he simply said “this was supposed to be unsolvable, so.”
Dr. Dantzig went on to have a brilliant career, developing the simplex algorithm and making other major contributions to linear programming. The story of this incident from graduate school evolved into something of a feel-good urban legend, and is often cited as inspiration for a similar scene in Will Hunting. In retellings, the solver of the unsolvable would become a far less expected person than a first year grad student.
Like a genius burnout with temper problems, perhaps.
Which is closer to the personality of the other real Will Hunting. Who we’ll talk about in part two, tomorrow.
This has been your Moment of Science, suggesting the moral of the story is to always be late for class.
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