Back in 1989 my boss was involved with the Science Olympiad. By day he ran a medical billing/practice management software company. By night he tutored gifted kids. He tapped me and one of my co-workers to be proctors for the computer science event. Funny thing, that eh? Considering we were writing code for him.
Anyways, it fell upon us (my boss and myself) to ascertain potential problems that would be solved during the events. The one caveat was that the problems had to solveable by no greater than Senior high-school mathematics. So calculus and higher math were right out.
Anyway one problem that we worked on was cost/benefit analysis of the shuttle. How many launches before it pays for itself as opposed to Apollo style launch vehicles.
Try as I might, I couldn’t solve the problem satisfatorily; it was a losing proposition from day One. My boss was quite a smart man, having a Ph.D in pathology with some background in mathematics and a computer scientist to boot. He didn’t like what I told him, so he worked through the problem with me. We refined the algorithm a little bit, and came up with a pretty sophisticated analysis of the problem. Net result: it was a money sieve. He kept muttering where are we going wrong. We must be doing something wrong.
I just happened to be taking Analytical Geometry and Calculus at the time, and I whipped out some integration and related rates of change on him. He looked over my work, looked at the computer screen at the results of our algorithm, looked at my work again. Shook his head, and muttered; “Another government boondogle throwing away billions of dollars of taxpayer money.” Then he walked away and I never heard him mention that problem again. Nor did we ever discuss it either.