Survivors can Kill you
Coffee was not as tasty and sophisticated as in Vienna. Abraham Wald was having these thoughts whilst sipping his first morning cup on a cold January morning of 1943. He was looking through the window of his Columbia University office as flocks of snow were falling on Manhattan’s streets. The cold winters had accompanied him throughout his life, from his hometown in Cluj (now Romania), to his college and doctorate years in Vienna to now New York City. This was the place that had warmly welcomed him and recognized his valued mathematician knowledge after having to flee Europe before the start of the war. He turned his head to his desk. There, the most important challenge of his life - in the shape of a pile of papers with drawings, letters and numbers – was lying just waiting for him to solve it. He was part of the Statistics Research Group (SRG), a team of renowned professors (including Milton Friedman and George Stigler – future Nobel Prizes) gathered by the US government to su...