What is the time resolved flourescence of a fluorophore in 4 dimensions?
The solution, explained to me by my friend who was a very smart physicist, was the first time I heard the word "tensor" (this was a long time ago, long before machine learning used that word) and I was obsessed with the idea that there was all this cool math you could use to solve hard problems.
I had never heard of that happening! It would be extremely cool if it ever worked.
>An event in Dantzig's life became the origin of a famous story in 1939, while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.[4][7]
>Six weeks later, Dantzig received a visit from an excited professor Neyman, who was eager to tell him that the homework problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Christopher_Longuet-Higgins
https://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathemat...
The problem sets would have several questions you were expected to solve, and then often 1-3 questions marked with 1 or 2 stars. I forget exactly the language, but there was some explanation that you probably couldn't solve the 1-star problems, and solving the two-star questions could be someone's PhD thesis, as it would require novel insight into an unsolved problem.
The point was that it was a class for young aspiring mathematicians many of whom were used to being the smartest person around, and this helped them confront problems they couldn't solve without feeling like total failures. Also at that kind of school, you never know, someone might be able to solve one.
[1] http://www.huffmancoding.com/my-uncle/scientific-american
That class led to a ton of imposter syndrome that took me decades to overcome. Thanks, Huffman.