The prevalence of military examples of math going wrong is not because the armed forces are particularly bad at mathematics. It’s partly because the military is big on research and development, so they are at the bleeding edge of what can be done, which tends to invite mistakes. Moreover, they have some level of public obligation to report on things that go wrong. Obviously, a lot of undoubtedly fascinating math mistakes never get declassified, but within private companies, even more mistakes are completely hushed up. I’m largely limited to talking about mistakes that have been openly reported
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