Statisticians in World War II

economist.com

67 points·mlla··7 comments

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

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

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.

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

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.

Or perhaps we're seldom willing that level of resources without great pressures. Even the much lower current US expenditures on research have been shown to be hugely rewarding economically we've kept cutting them. Pressure inducing behavior changes isn't quite the same as evolution, it happens on a much shorter time scale and isn't likely to follow the same curves when you remove the stimulus.

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.

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