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TIL that after running late to a class, George Dantzig copied down two problems he thought were homework and solved them. The two problems were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics, which later earned him his doctorate.

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via reddit.com

W7jZL TIL that Marlon Brando obsessively tried to instill discipline in his children. When his son Christian refused to go to school, Brando took him outside, fired a gun into the ground and told him that was what happened to people who didn’t get an education.
loagA TIL soaps have been made for millennia. Alongside making fire and cooking food, turning oils and fats into soap is one of the oldest and simplest chemical reactions known to humankind. It is believed that the first soaps were accidentally made by fat dripping into the ashes of cooking fires.
yQpp8 TIL Before she became a big name in pop music, Taylor Swift was knocking praying mantises out of Christmas trees. Her family lived on a tree farm, and the superstar’s job was to ensure customers’ christmas trees weren’t full of bugs.
Ooj0R TIL Nigerian universities suffer from a problem brought on by violent secret social student groups known as Confraternities. They're basically fraternity groups that operate and act like criminal mafias.
EwPP TIL when confronted by Steve Jobs about Windows using the same graphical interface as the Macintosh, Bill Gates responded by saying “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”