There is a post on Facebook about Abraham Wald that has circled a few times. Wald was born in Romania in 1902, the son of a Rabbi and Kosher baker. He had a proclivity towards mathematics from the beginning, and it was quickly recognized. He studied at the University of Vienna. With Austria in economic distress in 1933 and his studies completed, there was no way he could get a job offer from the University. He ended up working for the Austrian Institute for Economic Research. This led to a job offer in Colorado Springs in the U.S. for the Cowles Commission. Only a few months later he got an offer for a professorship in New York at Columbia, and he was on the move again. This is where the story gets interesting.
While at Columbia, Abraham was put in the top-secret Statistical Research Group (SRG). The SRG assembled some of the most brilliant statisticians at the time. One of the largest problems this group was presented with during WWII was how to better protect airplanes from being shot down. The government brought the group a bunch of data they thought would be helpful to figuring out where to place extra armor on the planes. You can’t just add armor all over the plane; it would then be too heavy.