Talk:George Dantzig/Archive 1

Archive 1

New link

I offer to add new link to the article:

• Photos

What do you think about it?

--Vdgr 14:55, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Award in his name

SIAM has a Prize in his honor, ref. [1]--Billymac00 (talk) 04:41, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Worksection removed

Due to possible violation of copyright, see WP:Copyvio, I have removed the worksection of this article for now. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 08:42, 10 October 2009 (UTC) P.S. I apologize for all inconvenience I have caused here, see also here. If you would like to assist in improving this article, please let me know. I can use all the help I can get. Thank you.

What does this mean

In the Biography section it says "Early in the 1920s the family moved over Baltimore to Washington." What has Baltimore to do with anything? The family was in Oregon. Is it trying to say "Early in the 1920s the family moved to Baltimore and then to Washington"? -- SGBailey (talk) 20:14, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

named after?

"George Dantzig was born in Portland, Oregon, and with his middle name "Bernard" named after the writer George Bernard Shaw.[2] "

Not just his middle name, it appears. George Bernard Dantzig, George Bernard Shaw.

Bart (talk) 06:29, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

elaborate on the "unsolvable" problems

The article says that Dantzig solved two problems that were initially believed to be unsolvable, but makes no mention of what those two problems were. Could someone with expertise in this field please consider adding details about those two problems? --Ixfd64 (talk) 05:43, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I’m not an expert on this topic, but with a little googling around I found the following article [2], which mentions following facts:

• Dantzig solved those problems in year 1939
• Six week later Dantzig’s professor has prepared one of his two “homework” proofs for publication
• The second problem was not published (except in Dantzig’s PhD thesis) until after the WWII, when another mathematician, Abraham Wald, rediscovered the proof, and they co-published the paper together in The Annals of Mathematical Statistics.

These facts lead me to believe that the two papers were “Dantzig, G. B. (1 June 1940). "On the Non-Existence of Tests of "Student's" Hypothesis Having Power Functions Independent of σ". The Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 11 (2): 186–192. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177731912. ISSN 0003-4851. JSTOR 2235875.”, and “Dantzig, G. B.; Wald (1 March 1951). "On the Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson". The Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 22 (1): 87–93. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177729695. ISSN 0003-4851. JSTOR 2236704.”, and thus the two problems are:

1. For a family of iid normal random N(μ,σ²) variables with unknown mean and variance, find a test with power function independent of σ. (The answer to this problem is negative: no such test exists).
2. (The second is trickier and I cannot quite figure out how to put it in terms simple enough that it could have fit on a blackboard).

... stpasha » talk » 02:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

The citations are correct, and the historty is recounted in the interview in "(More?) Mathematical People" (which was published in the College Mathematics Journal) and in the introduction by Richard W. Cottle to "The Basic Dantzig". Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 22:50, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

How famous were these problems? The obituary (perhaps with some embellishment?) calls them "two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics". The Snopes article quotes Dantzig himself calling them "two famous unsolved problems in statistics". But the second wasn't even published until several years later when someone else proved it.... If they were both so famous, a delay seems very strange, especially since his professor wrote up and submitted the first one on his own. 24.220.188.43 (talk) 08:20, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

World War II was, i. a., a distraction from scientific publishing.  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 09:37, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Okay, but the second paper linked above was published in 1951, six years after the war ended. 24.220.188.43 (talk) 16:26, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

"Urban legend" section

This recently-added section covers a topic that was already included elsewhere in the article. Also, titling the new section "urban legend" suggests that the story might not be true, when it is actually quite well documented. The new text is good and probably ought to be merged with the earlier material, but it doesn't belong in a separate section. I don't have time to fix it right now; if I remember to come back, I will, but I'm flagging it in case I don't. Isomorphic (talk) 20:45, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

I changed the section title to "Early Anecdote", but the material is still duplicated under "Work" Brianbleakley (talk) 15:41, 6 June 2015 (UTC)