On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:02:17 +0000, Sarah Vaughan
wrote:

I've always thought that being smart to the degree of ignoring social
conventions had more to do with that. Like the math whiz who works as a school
custodian, submitting papers to mathematical journals (may be apocryphal story
though ...).

Heh - I thought that was the plot of 'Good Will Hunting'? ;-)

I do wonder if some of that legend came from the career of George
Bernard Dantzig.

He never worked as a custodian, but....

http://www2.informs.org/History/dant..._interview.htm

The son of a mathematician and the "Father of Linear Programming" —
not to mention the inventor of the simplex method and one of the most
revered figures in the history of operations research — Dantzig nearly
flunked out of his ninth-grade algebra class.

Fortunately for the O.R. community, Dantzig's math skills improved.

Dantzig went on to earn an A.B. degree in mathematics and physics from
the University of Maryland (where his father taught mathematics), an
M.A. in mathematics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in
mathematics from the University of California-Berkeley in 1946.

It was while a grad student at Berkeley in the 1940s that Dantzig
displayed the unique brand of genius that would eventually elevate him
to almost mythical status in the O.R. community. Dantzig, believing he
was working on a couple of "homework" assignments, instead solved two
famous "unsolvable" problems that had stumped generations of
statisticians. A legend was born.


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits