AN UNEASY ALLIANCE
CHAPTER 6 OF THE LIFE OF A BAYESIAN BOY
THE ENIGMATIC EIGHTIES
SCIENTIFIC INFERENCE, ROBUSTNESS AND DATA ANALYSIS
edited by George Box , Tom Leonard, and Chien-Fu Wu
I worked half time at the Math Research Center (M.R.C) between
1979 and 1983 when it was housed in the WARF building and John Nohel
was Director and the statisticians George Box, Bernie Harris and Chien-Fu
Wu were in residence, and I was forced to work on sensitive military applications,contrary to State Law. In 1991 and during the Gulf War, my
account of these clandestine activities was published in the Daily Cardinal,
the students' newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this led
to a tremendous furore, For example, numerous students complained to
Chancellor Donna Shalala, John Nohel was dragged out of bed to explain
what had been going on, and Senator Barry Goldwater leapt to M.R.C.
defense. That seemed to spell M.R.C.'s final death knell, and thank
goodness for that M.R.C. had previously been bombed while it was housed
in Sterling Hall during the Vietnam War, and it shouldn't have been allowed
to survive for as long as it did, The U.S. Army shifted its funding to Cornel
University in 1987. George Box once told their top brass to 'fuck off'
when they invited him to review the troops from a helicopter, but he
believed in giving the military an occasional 'lollipop'.
"During the Vietnam War, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors of the southern (east-west) wing of Sterling Hall housed the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC). This was an Army-funded think tank, directed by J. Barkley Rosser, Sr.
ReplyDeleteThe staff at the center, at the time of the bombing, consisted of about 45 mathematicians, about 30 of them full-time. Rosser was well known for his research in pure mathematics, known for research in logic (Rosser's trick, the Kleene–Rosser paradox, and the Church-Rosser theorem) and in number theory (Rosser sieve). Rosser had been the head of the U.S. ballistics program during World War II and also had contributed to research on several missiles used by the U.S. military.
The money to build a home for AMRC came from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) in 1955. Their money built a 6-floor addition to Sterling Hall. In the contract to work at the facility, it was required that mathematicians spend at least half their time on U.S. Army research.
Rosser publicly minimized any military-role of the center and implied that AMRC pursued mathematics, including both pure and applied mathematics. The University of Wisconsin student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, obtained and published quarterly reports that AMRC submitted to the Army. The Cardinal published a series of investigative articles making a convincing case that AMRC was pursuing research that was directly pursuant to specific U.S. Department of Defense requests, and relevant to counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. AMRC became a magnet for demonstrations, in which protesters chanted "U.S. out of Vietnam! Smash Army Math!"
The Army Mathematics Research Center was phased out by the Department of Defense at the end of the 1970 fiscal year"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing#Army_Mathematics_Research_Center
"Department of the Army
DeleteArmy Mathematics Research Center (University of Wisconsin). Phased out as FFRDC at end of FY 1970."
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf99334/decert.htm#dod