In 1939, UC Berkeley student George Dantzig walked into his statistics class and saw two unsolved problems on the board. Mistaking them for homework, he took them home and solved them within days. His professor, Jerzy Neyman, was stunned and spent weeks verifying the solutions before publishing them as breakthroughs in statistical theory. This “accident” foreshadowed Dantzig’s incredible future. He went on to invent the simplex algorithm, pioneering linear programming—a tool now vital in airline