“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.” – Dean Schlieter

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

November 22

Has mathematics ever been more grim? In the first 30 days of the 1864 campaign between the principal army of the North, the Army of the Potomac, under the command of Ulysses S. Grant and the principal army of the South, the Army of Northern Virginia, under the command of Robert E. Lee, the North lost 50% more than did the enemy, and yet there was sense in the awful arithmetic propounded by the President. 'If the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results,’ observed the President a few months earlier, ‘the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone. No general yet found can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered.'

‘Do the best you can, leaving others to talk of you as they will.'

- Anonymous