One of the most insightful surveys of wartime mathematics comes from J. Barkley Rosser, a University of Wisconsin professor who interviewed some 200 mathematicians who, like him, had been pressed into national service. Rosser concluded that mathematicians acted as a kind of accelerant, helpful in speeding up research and development that would otherwise have been painfully manual and slow. The attitude of many with the problems they were asked to solve was that the given problem was not really mathematics but, since an answer was needed, urgently and quickly, they got on with it. . . . Without
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