Dantzig was the guy who showed up late to statistics class one day, saw some problems on the blackboard, wrote them down, and turned in the solutions a couple weeks later apologizing for the lateness and saying that that week's assignment seemed harder than usual. No George, that wasn't a homework assignment, those were examples of then-currently unsolved problems in that particular topic. The professor showed up at Dantzig's house on a Sunday morning asking Dantzig to sign the paper so it could be sent off for publication. That was the first moment that Dantzig had any inkling that it wasn't the regular course homework. A true legend.
This reminds me how I once took a CS class titled something like “Optimization and Integer Programming”, which turned out to be about quite different notions of programming and optimization than I had expected.
The Soviets actually pioneered a lot of this stuff in the 1920s and 1930s as part of their planned economy, but of course they didn’t have computers back then. They’d even tried to solve for the minimum-cost diet problem but had to reject it because it ended up some unpalatable combo of flour and vitamin-fortified margarine. Leonid Kantorovich had proposed a solution in 1939, but Dantzig’s simplex algorithm was the first formally proven and practical method. Logistics has always been the US Armed Forces’ forte, and this, along with other Operations Research breakthroughs from RAND Corporation is how the US built its edge.
Kantorovich's applied maths was very applicable indeed. During the siege of Leningrad, he was calculating things like optimal baskets and convoy distances to maximise utility of the only route not Nazi-held.
and while that video starts in media res wrt the transcript, with the father of linear programming question, that question and his response are in the transcript verbatim, it seems.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble...