Statisticians in World War II

[ramanan]

My favorite story about the application of statistics to the second world war, is the `German Tank Problem`. Statisticians' estimate of German Panther tanks proved to be much more closer to the real number than conventional intelligence estimates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

[sebastianavina]

only because that article, I decided I wanted an applied statistics master degree

[1971genocide]

I always have cognitive dissonance with the irony, that most of the rapid progress in science was a result or resulted from war and human misery.

[mikhailfranco]

It's an inevitable result of Darwinian evolution: the rate of change is greatest where the competitive or environmental pressure is highest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man#.22Swiss_cuckoo_c...

For example, you don't go from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 67 years without two World Wars and a Cold War.

[balsam]

http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow_intro.htm

[CurtMonash]

Economists had similar experiences. I ate lunch with Tom Schelling frequently in the period 1979-81, and got the impression that WW2 had been one of the most intellectually exciting times of his life.

And of course something similar is true of physicists and engineers.