The war’s end had brought the military a thorny problem: the exit from public service of many of the nation’s top scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Beginning in wartime, as Sylvia Nasar wrote, “to be plucked from academe and initiated into the secret world of the military had become something of a rite of passage for the mathematical elite.” Now, though, “how to keep the best and brightest thinking about military problems was far from obvious.
