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George Dantzig, 1914-2005

Posted by timothy on from the life-well-lived dept.

Markus Registrada writes "George Dantzig, the inventor of the Simplex method for solving Linear Programming problems, died on May 13. He was also the now-legendary student who turned in solutions for what he had taken to be a homework assignment, only to find out they had been posted as examples of what were suspected to be unsolvable problems."

1 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Re:At least he was lucky. by YOU+LIKEWISE+FAIL+IT · · Score: 0, Troll

    If the problem was indeed unsolvable, then nobody in the set of exam students would have been able to solve it correctly either.

    As the purpose of university exams since the invention of the grading curve is largely to sort the students by some semi-abstract form of academic capability, there really was no deleterious effect from you losing that mark.

    YLFI

    --
    One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.