Hah! This reminded me of a similar story:

"In 1951, David A. Huffman and his MIT information theory classmates were given the choice of a term paper or a final exam. The professor, Robert M. Fano, assigned a term paper on the problem of finding the most efficient binary code. Huffman, unable to prove any codes were the most efficient, was about to give up and start studying for the final when he hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient.[5]

In doing so, Huffman outdid Fano, who had worked with Claude Shannon to develop a similar code. Building the tree from the bottom up guaranteed optimality, unlike the top-down approach of Shannon–Fano coding."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#History

I took Huffman's class at UCSC and he said he had actually thrown the solution in the garbage before realizing it worked and retrieving it.

When we started grad school, one of the professors introduced themself and said they thought it was interesting that adaptive optics was being used in astronomy and maybe the same idea could be used to improve microscopy and 7 years later a new phd was born doing exactly that!

  Over time, some facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.

Aha, I thought this sounded familiar...

There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved.

> There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved.

Or perhaps when you don't know it can't (yet) be solved.

When I started reading my brain went straight to Von Neumann. Now I really want to read a fanfic about a story where John Von Neumann is invited to a Google interview.

Maybe not Von Neumann at google, but how about Feynman at Microsoft?

https://sellsbrothers.com/12395

> The people authorized to open manhole covers could easily be trained to do it safely.

Funny as it is, I would like to think that someone famous for his role in the investigation of the Challenger disaster would never flippantly say that a dangerous situation doesn't matter because "people … could easily be trained to do it safely." The fact that people can be trained to do something properly doesn't mean that trained people won't still sometimes do it improperly.

> That statement is a tautology.

This is giving me vietnam-style university flashbacks.

> We are going to recommend you for immediate hiring into the marketing department.

I am reminded of this Feynman story:

https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...

Carlo Beenakker answered on MathOverflow (https://mathoverflow.net/a/298601):

> The two problems that Dantzig solved were eventually published in: On the Non-Existence of Tests of "Student's" Hypothesis Having Power Functions Independent of σ (1940) and in On the Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson (1951).

Thank you! Spent more time looking for that than I'm willing to admit