Talk:Abraham Wald

Untitled
Can somebody help correctly fill in the citation for the aircraft study. The only biblio reference I can find is http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA091073 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.81.26.230 (talk) 23:44, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe because the original study on survivability was done by Patrick Blackett. 46.138.66.128 (talk) 20:40, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Documentation by http://lesswrong.com/lw/bbv/examine_your_assumptions/ suggests it was Wald, and most notably cites the article http://people.ucsc.edu/~msmangel/Wald.pdf. Colin McLarty (talk) 23:30, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Name
I think his name should correctly be written as Ábrahám Wald. I obviously cannot provide a birth certificate but I am quite sure that this was his official name despite the way he appeared on publications. Also, the disclaimer about Western--non-Western name order should apply.--146.110.156.217 (talk) 23:04, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't there be an explanation of the original pronunciation of his family name? Morgenstern claims that it is German and thus it should be pronunced /valt/ (to be written in IPA). Per W (talk) 07:52, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Nationality
He was born on the territory of Austro-Hungarian Empire. His native language was Hungarian. In his obituary Oskar Morgenstern noted, "His name was German, his language Hungarian, and he never developed any affinity for Romania."

Changing his nationality to Romanian on this page is disrespectful to him. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Szesan (talk • contribs) 15:18, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Aircraft damage
The article states, "Researchers from the Center for Naval Analyses had conducted a study of the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions, and had recommended that armor be added to the areas that showed the most damage." I can find no such statement from a reliable source. The paper Abraham Wald's Work on Aircraft Survivability by Marc Mangle and Francisco Samaniego (linked in the article references) only says that, "The operational commander does not know the distribution of hits on an aircraft that did not return. This is the basic difficulty in making a decision." Nowhere have I found anything, other than one website quoting another, confirming that anyone, much less a researcher said to armor the aircraft where hits were doing little damage. The above paper states that Wald was brought in to make a statistical analysis on the damage of returning aircraft to find where best to armor the aircraft. I think the statement in question is spreading apocryphal nonsense. Rsduhamel (talk) 21:10, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

I have since found this: The Legend of Abraham Wald (http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fc-2016-06). This well-researched article says the statement is plausible, but the only source appears to be unreliable. Rsduhamel (talk) 22:33, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

It is almost certainly false that that the researchers from the Center for Naval Analyses recommended that armor be added to the areas that showed the most damage. This is absurd, as these researchers were competent statisticians who surely understood that failed-to-return aircraft had a different distribution of hits then for returned aircraft. Wald's work is described accurately in the Mangle et al article but is described inaccurately from many other sources. As stated by Mangle et al, Wald derived closed form solutions by assuming constant vulnerability of different parts of the aircraft, known bounds on rate of growth of vulnerability, and independence of survival across vulnerabilities. The legends and folklore do not trump the actual math. I will make edits accordingly. Sbelknap (talk) 21:34, 27 May 2019 (UTC)