A Berkeley student solved unproved theorems that his professor wrote on the chalkboard because he thought they were homework!

His name is George Dantzig, and this story has become something of a legend. In 1939, while a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Dantzig entered his classroom and saw two famous unsolved statistics problems on the board. He arrived late, and little did he know that the professor had drawn them on there as examples before he had arrived.

He wrote them down, believing them to be homework and arrived in class with answers to both of them a few days later! He said that they seemed a little bit harder than normal, but other than that believed it to be routine.

His professor approached his several weeks later wishing to publish his solutions and even told him to forget about writing a thesis and instead just wrap his answers up in a binder. The story became world famous was actually the inspiration for the opening scene of the famous movie Good Will Hunting!