Time flies like an arrow, but fruit, fruit flies like a banana.

Hey, it's Auro, and this is a special archive episode of Akimbo.

This may not surprise you, but in high school, I was on the math team.

The math team even had a cheer.

Cosine tangent, arc sine sine, 3.14159, go math team.

And the math team depended in its competitions on a relay race.

The way the relay race worked was each of five people got a problem,

but you couldn't do the problem until you got the answer from the person ahead of you in the race.

So the first person would solve the problem, come up with the answer, seven,

and the number seven to the second person who would plug it into their problem, and on and on.

Well, I was the anchor, not sure why, and I looked at my problem,

and I knew I was going to have 15 or 20 minutes to sit there before it got handed over to me.

But I also realized that there were only 99 different numbers that could have been handed to me based on the way the problem was organized.

So I built a grid, answering pretty much all of the 99 so that when my number came to me, I just looked up in the grid, and we got the answer.

And that was the one and only time we ever succeeded on the math team.

The lesson for me there was an understanding intuitively that turns out to have been built into something called Gantt charts and CPM.

And what these are are techniques that were built by the armed forces to help them with incredibly complicated projects like building a battleship.

If you're going to build a battleship, a whole bunch of things have to happen in the correct order.

So a simple little trivial example.

If you wipe your face with an napkin and then eat a big spaghetti dinner, the fact that you did it in the wrong order will embarrass you.

You have to eat the dinner before you use the napkin.

Well, the same thing is true in building a battleship.

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