There was something else, too: as Rosser suggested, the math problems brought forth by the war were hardly math at all—or, at least, they were beneath anyone considered worth working on them. The defense establishment had, in a sense, overinvested in brainpower. In Rosser’s words, one of his colleagues insisted to his dying day . . . that he never did an iota of mathematics during the War. True enough, the problems were mostly very pedestrian stuff, as mathematics. I was never required to appeal to the Gödel incompleteness theorem, or use the ergodic theorem, or any other key results in that
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