[telotortium]

Not quite the same, but David Huffman was given a choice between writing a term paper on finding the optimal binary code and a final exam. Just before he was about to give up on the term paper, he solved the term paper problem by inventing Huffman Coding[1].

[1] http://www.huffmancoding.com/my-uncle/scientific-american

[dekhn]

my own huffman story: I took huffman's class, cybernetics, in college (thinking that it would teach me how to build robots that interfaced with humans). However, the class was mostly about how to build circuits, and Karnaugh maps weighed heavily. The final problem on the final test was a tricky Karnaugh map and I got it wrong- although I knew that you could form squares that "wrapped" around the top and bottom edges, but he put a square that was wrapped around the four corners: 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 and I totally missed that the symmetry applied in both directions at the same time (I'd call that a tricky question rather than a trick question).

That class led to a ton of imposter syndrome that took me decades to overcome. Thanks, Huffman.