Author Archives: mathscinotes

While looking for some good summer history reading, I found the book America's Hundred Thousand: U.S. Production Fighters of World War II. This book covers the production miracle associated with scaling up up the US aircraft industry to supply planes for every front during WW2. Its title refers to the fact that the US produced ~100K fighter aircraft during WW2, which lasted for 44 months for the US (Figure 2). I decided that I would look at the numbers for all forms of aircraft produced by the US during WW2. Fortunately, the Hyperwar website has put the Army Air Forces Statistical Digest online, which gives me easy access to the data. The Digest contains aircraft production data for both the US and Canada. Figure 1 shows the production numbers for the 11 categories of aircraft production listed in the Statistical Digest. In addition to 100K fighter aircraft, there were nearly 200K of other aircraft manufactured as well. Continue reading →

It has been 50 years since 1968, and I have been seeing quite a few retrospectives on television about that tumultuous year. I was in 6th-grade in 1968 and the chaos of that year is still very clear in my memory – I remember spending quite a bit of class time on the Paris peace talks. One lesson was about how the Paris Peace negotiators argued about the shape of the table at which they would sit. Arguing about the shape of a table while people were dying seemed ridiculous to a 12-year boy. After hearing all these recent discussions about 1968, I decided to look at the US Vietnam casualty data (Figure 1) to see what insights I could gain on that year. All my work is done in Excel and my workbook is here. Continue reading →