
Statisticians in World War II - mlla
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636589-how-statisticians-changed-war-and-war-changed-statistics-they-also-served
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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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem)

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

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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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man#.22Swiss_cuckoo_clock.22_speech)

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

~~~
nieve
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.

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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.

