coach the Washington Redskins, and said of him that “I gave George an
unlimited budget, and he overspent it.” George Steinbrenner, the owner
of the New York Yankees, is a firm believer in the theory that if one pays
top dollar for top professionals, one produces top teams. The payroll for
the New York Yankees in 2006 exceeded $200 million—and while the
team got to the play-offs, they lost to the Detroit Tigers in the first round,
an event cheered not only by Tiger fans but by confirmed Yankee haters
such as myself.
On the other side of the algorithm divide is the belief that if one tries to
buy components by minimizing the dollars-spent-per-past-desirable-
outcome-achieved (such as purchasing a cleanup hitter using dollars per
home run hit last year), good results can be obtained with a limited
budget. This approach, known as “moneyball,” was developed by Billy
Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who constructed
several remarkably successful teams while spending very little money.
One of his disciples was Paul DePodesta, who took over my beloved Los
Angeles Dodgers (actually, I’m a Cub fan, but the Dodgers are beloved of
my wife, and when the woman is happy the man is happy)—and ruined
them with the moneyball philosophy. DePodesta was summarily dis-
missed and replaced by Nick Colletti, a man with a solid baseball pedi-
gree, and the Dodgers have made it back to the play-offs twice in the last
four years.
While the examples cited above come from professional sports, the goals
of any organization are similar. If the magic formula for organizational
success in professional sports is discovered, you can bet the farm that
management experts will study this formula in order to adopt it to other
enterprises. Today the Dodgers, tomorrow Microsoft.
So what’s the lesson? The lesson, which we shall investigate more thor-
oughly later in the book, is that some problems may well be so complex
that there is no perfect way to solve them.
Unless you are a professional mathematician, you have no chance of
coming up with a solution to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture,
but any person of reasonable intelligence can probably devise a variety of
scheduling algorithms. Want to take a shot? One of the attractive aspects
to a mathematical problem is that the only items needed are paper, pen-
cil, and time—but be aware that this problem has resisted the best efforts
of several generations of mathematicians.
Mathematics and science have stood at the threshold of great unsolved
problems before. Two millennia of mathematicians had worked ardu-
ously to discover the solutions of polynomial equations of degree four
or less, and in the sixteenth century the general solution of the quintic
(the polynomial of degree five) was the goal of the best algebraists in the
8 How Math Explains the World