How statistics won the Second World War

Well, "won" may be an exaggeration, but apparently a certain statistical formula certainly helped. Curious? Read on:

A simple statistical formula successfully estimated the number of tanks the enemy was producing, at a time when this could not be directly observed by the allied spy network.

By 1941-42, the allies knew that US and even British tanks had been technically superior to German Panzer tanks in combat, but they were worried about the capabilities of the new marks IV and V. More troubling, they had really very little idea of how many tanks the enemy was capable of producing in a year. Without this information, they were unsure whether any invasion of the continent on the western front could succeed.

One solution was to ask intelligence to guess the number by secretly observing the output of German factories, or by trying to count tanks on the battlefield. Both the British and the Americans tried this, but they found that the estimates returned by intelligence were contradictory and unreliable. Therefore they asked statistical intelligence to see whether the accuracy of the estimates could be improved.

The statisticians had one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured mark V tanks. The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced. And this deduction turned out to be right. It was enough to enable them to make an estimate of the total number of tanks that had been produced up to any given moment.

You can read the whole story here. Personally, I find this sort of thing fascinating. Scientists, mathematicians, and indeed statisticians made extremely important contributions to the Allied war effort, and while these contributions are easily overlooked and often forgotten, I don't think it's an understatement to say that the war would've gone very differently without them. Civilians cracked both the German Enigma and the Japanese cryptography, preventing thousands of Allied casualties. I'm very glad that, at long last, the scientists and mathematicians behind these efforts are finally getting the recognition they deserve. (Particularly Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence and computer science, who despite cracking Enigma was persecuted by the British government to the point of suicide because he was gay.)