The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales from the Netherlands

Copyright © 2008 by Theo Meder

The storyteller heard that in the school for lower general secondary education (in Dutch, Mavo) that a friend of his attended, a new teacher had been appointed just before the final exams. For the physics exam, he wrote down two sums. He said the one on the left could not be solved, whereas the one on the right could. A boy came in very late, so he didn't hear about one of the sums being insoluble. He managed to solve both of them, even within the set time. The storyteller doesn't know if it's true, but it sounded like a nice story. Later he saw the same idea in the movie Good Will Hunting. For that reason, he found it even funnier.

This urban legend is a version of BRUN 10200, The Unsolvable Math Problem. The story was told to collector Elise de Bree on September 5, 1998, by Laurens Calon from Goirle (province of North Brabant). The translation is based on T. Meder, De magische vlucht (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 188-189.