Greg Bernard Dantzig was a doctorate student at the University of California, Berkley, in 1939. He walked in late to his statistics class one day, saw two problems written on the board, and wrote them down in his notebook to do for homework. What Dantzig didn’t know was that these were not, in fact, homework problems, but examples of famous unsolved statistics problems. He took them home and unknowingly solved them. Dantzig noted that he turned his homework several days late, but apologized to the professor, explaining that he felt the problems were difficult than what they were learning. The homework paper was left to join a pile of papers on the professor’s desk.
Weeks later, his professor came to him and told him that one of his answers was going to be published. Dantzig, of course, had no clue what the professor was referring to until he explained the mix-up. When it came time for Dantzig to do his thesis, the professor told him to simply put together the binder with the two problems, and that would be acceptable as his thesis. Nearly a decade after his initial finding, Dantzig was given the distinction of co-author for the second problem, when a mathematician reached the same solution that he had.