Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 65. Oh, oh, oh, oh.

And do me. 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 those 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 move their families across the country, some across an ocean, so they could work together.

As they unpacked, the theaters in their new hometowns replace posters for Citizen Kane with those for Casablanca,

and the newspapers they unwrapped from photo frames and plates featured stories still unraveling

the events at Pearl Harbor. Many still held

held positions at Pearl Harbor.

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 they could help crush Hitler, not with guns and

...