I was thinking about Abraham Wald today. If the stories can be believed, he was kind of a war hero in WWII, although I don’t think he got any medals for it. I don’t know how much of it is apocryphal and how much is verified fact, but this is my understanding of his wartime contribution.
When Nazi tanks rolled over Europe, Wald had to flee because he was a Jew. He was also a mathematician, which how he ended up as a professor of statistics at Cornell University in New York City. But he didn’t just teach undergraduates about T tests and P values. He was part of a classified group of mathematicians who worked on difficult military problems.
One such problem concerned US aircraft, the big ones that dropped bombs over enemy lines. Too many of them never returned from their missions. They were shot down by the fighter planes of the German Luftwaffe.
So the military compiled a lot of data about the planes and their missions. How many planes came back, how many didn’t. They even analyzed exactly where the planes were taking the most damage. There they found a pattern. Some parts of the planes were riddled with bullet holes, others not so much.
Turns out, it’s possible to armor these parts of the planes from bullets. But you can’t use too much. Armor is heavy. The extra weight means they are slower and use more fuel. What is the optimal amount of armor to use so that more of them returned home while still being light enough to achieve their missions?
This is the question that landed on Abraham Wald’s desk. But instead of giving them an answer to this question, he helped them solve the real problem.
When the military analyzed which parts of the aircraft were taking the most damage, they didn’t stop to consider an important point: They were only looking at the planes that returned. The ones that were shot down were taking damage in other parts of the aircraft.
And so, on Wald’s advice, they armored the parts of the planes where they had seen little damage. And it worked. With armor in these places, more missions succeeded, more airmen survived, and more bombers returned home. Problem solved.
It takes a certain kind of bravery and heroism to invade occupied France and drive out the Nazis. But sometimes success on the battlefield depends on the ability to think about things differently than everyone else.