The Misconception: You should study the successful if you wish to become successful.
The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.
In New York City, in an apartment a few streets away from
the center of Harlem, above trees reaching out over sidewalks and dogs
pulling at leashes and conversations cut short to avoid parking tickets,
a group of professional thinkers once gathered and completed equations
that would both snuff and spare several hundred thousand human lives.
People walking by the apartment at the time had no idea
that four stories above them some of the most important work in applied
mathematics was tilting the scales of a global conflict as secret agents
of the United States armed forces, arithmetical soldiers, engaged in
statistical combat. Nor could people today know as they open umbrellas
and twist heels on cigarettes, that nearby, in an apartment overlooking
Morningside Heights, one of these soldiers once effortlessly prevented
the United States military from doing something incredibly stupid,
something that could have changed the flags now flying in capitals
around the world had he not caught it, something you do every day.
These masters of math moved their families across the
country, some across an ocean, so they could work together. As they
unpacked, the theaters in their new hometown replaced posters for
Citizen Kane with those for Casablanca, and the newspapers they
unwrapped from photo frames and plates featured stories still
unravelling the events at Pearl Harbor. Many still held positions at
universities. Others left those sorts of jobs to think deeply in one of
the many groups that worked for the armed forces, free of any other
obligations aside from checking in on their families at night and
feeding their brains during the day. All paused their careers and rushed
to enlist so that they help to crush Hitler, not with guns and brawn,
but with integers and exponents.
The official name for the people inside the apartment was
the Statistical Research Group, a cabal of geniuses assembled at the
request of the White House and made up of people who would go on to
compete for and win Nobel Prizes. The SRG was an extension of Columbia
University, and they dealt mainly with statistical analysis. Other
groups with different specialities were tied to Harvard, Princeton,
Brown and others, 11 in all, each a leaf at the end of a new branch of
the government created to help defeat the Axis – the Department of War
Math.
Actually…no. They were never officially known by such a
deliciously sexy title. They were instead called the Applied Mathematics
Panel, but they operated as if they were a department of war math.
The Department, ahem, the Panel, was created because the
United States needed help. A surge of new technology had flooded into
daily life, and the same wonders that years earlier drove ticket sales
to the World’s Fair were now cracking open cities. Numbers and variables
now massed into scenarios far too complex to solve with maps and
binoculars. The military realized it faced problems that no soldier had
ever confronted. No best practices yet existed for things like rockets
and radar stations and aircraft carriers. The most advanced
computational devices available were clunky experiments made of
telephone switches or vacuum tubes. A calculator still looked like the
mutant child of an old-fashioned cash register and a mechanical
typewriter. If you wanted solutions to the newly unfathomable problems
of modern combat you needed powerful number crunchers, and in 1941 the
world’s most powerful number crunchers ran on toast and coffee and wore
ties to breakfast.
Here is how it worked:
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