How Not to Be Wrong

Counterintuitive Thinking

All the brilliant mathematicians working at the top-secret Statistical Research Group (SRG) during World War II regarded Abraham Wald as their most brilliant colleague. Wald, a Jewish immigrant fleeing the Nazis, took a professorship at Columbia University. From there, the US government recruited him into the SRG, which was housed just blocks away from Columbia. As physics was to the Manhattan Project that built America’s atom bomb, so math was to the SRG. As for accumulated brainpower, the people there saw Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel in economics, as the “fourth-smartest” person in the group. Everyone knew Wald was the smartest.

The group’s mathematicians and their staff figured out formulas determining the best arc of flight for a fighter plane to follow as it sought to shoot down an enemy aircraft. One remarkable aspect of the SRG was that those who had to live with its conclusions adopted its suggestions immediately. When the SRG suggested the most effective combination of ammunition types for fighter planes, the planes’ mechanics loaded precisely that combination into the guns. This meant SRG mathematicians benefited...