3 ms·

It depends on the assumptions you make. For example, are the planes you're measuring a uniformly random sample of all planes you're interested in? The answer is

• tedunangst 12y ago
  That sounds like different problems have different solutions. "Most math problems are (initially) poorly defined" would have been a better title, I guess.
  • djokkataja 12y ago
    I agree with your title suggestion. The author phrases the problem in an intentionally misleading way: "They examined the fuselages of all the damaged planes that had flown back after being hit to see where the most damage was. It turned out that the engines had an average of 1.11 bullet holes per square foot, the fuel system had 1.55, the fuselages 1.73, and the rest of the plane 1.8." He says that they checked to see where the most damage was, but really they were checking to see where the least damage was. If the planes were able to fly back with terrible damage to everything except for one part, then adding armor to that part is a pretty obvious solution. On the other hand, figuring out exactly how much armor to add is much more complicated, because you have the constraints of weight, production time, etc, plus you have to have some kind of estimate for the effectiveness of the armor in actual combat. I would probably go with "Most Real-World Math Problems Do Not Have a Unique Right Answer".
  • j2kun 12y ago
    And, perhaps surprisingly, most mathematical work in the real world is spent figuring out which assumptions are useful to model the problem and which are not. You sound like you are claiming that modeling the problem is not part of the problem, but somehow "before" the problem is posed. It sounds like a fantasy to me.