Dr. Robert Schuller, who is known for his emphasis on positive thinking or possibility thinking as he calls it, tells about a man he once met on a flight to Los Angeles. The man was a mathematician named George Dantzig. Schuller made the observation to Dantzig that this was the first time it had occurred to him that there was a field of endeavor to which positive thinking didn't apply.

Mathematical problems have only one right answer, so they can't be affected in any way by how a person thinks. Dantzig said Schuller was wrong. Dantzig explained that during the Depression he had been a student of mathematics at the University of California-Berkeley. People were hungry and desperate for any job they could get. Dantzig, along with all his other classmates, desperately wanted the job of assis…