Blackjack Strategy

If you ever learned basic blackjack strategy you owe a debt to these four Army buddies from Aberdeen Proving Ground and their paper "The optimum strategy in blackjack" published in Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1956. They developed a system of equations for an exact solution, but had to do all of their calculations by hand. Edward Thorpe later verified their work on an IBM 704 computer.

The last surviving member of the group died in 2021 at age 91 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/obituaries/roger-baldwin-dead.html

Finally tracked down this short paper by Edward Thorp, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1961, where he picked up the work started by Baldwin et al. He would later go on to publish the book "Beat The Dealer"