World War II was among other things a math problem.

And Lawrence resident G. Baley Price helped solve it.

G. Baley Price looks at a commemorative picture of a P-51 Mustang from the American Air Museum in Great Britain. Price, 97, will be attending dedication ceremonies at the museum near Cambridge. Price was a mathematics professor at Kansas University who was sent to England during World War II to help the military improve bombing accuracy.

Today, Price is leaving for England to help dedicate a museum that pays tribute to U.S. airpower in World War II and to the men and women who made it effective.

A Harvard-educated mathematician, Price had been teaching at Kansas University about five years when he got the call in 1943 from then-Chancellor Deane Malott.

“The war was on, but I had a deferment I was teaching men in uniform,” Price recalled.

But Malott told Price the U.S. Army Air Corps was putting together special problem-solving units of mathematicians, physicists, engineers and architects. Price, then 38, was a prime candidate.

“They wanted me to go to the South Pacific,” he said. “And then as soon as everything was formalized and I’d said I’d go, they said, ‘Fine, we’re sending you to England.'”

Price spent the next two years from 1943 to 1945 in England, helping bomber pilots improve their accuracy. Or, as he explained: “It didn’t do much good to drop a bomb on a cabbage field.”

Sole survivor?

Now, Price is 97 years old. He’s fairly certain he’s the sole surviving member of the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force Operational Research Section.

It’s both a distinction and an obligation, he said.

“I feel I should do what I can do to honor those who lost their lives,” Price said.

He’s leaving today for Washington, D.C., where he’ll join his son, Griffith B. Price, and grandson, Andrew Price, on a flight to England. There, he’ll attend dedication ceremonies at the American Air Museum near Cambridge.

Former President George Bush is scheduled to address the gathering. More than 4,000 U.S. veterans and family members are expected to attend.

“Last week, this nation was up in arms rightfully so over the events of Sept. 11 in which almost 3,000 people were killed. It was a great tragedy, and I will take nothing away from that,” Price said recently. “But 30,000 members of the Eighth Air Force lost their lives during the war. That, too, was a tragedy.”

Price said he’s not worried about today’s flight.

“At my age, I feel like I have to go.”

The 70,000-square-foot museum features an extensive collection of World War II aircraft including a B-52 Stratofortress, B-17 Flying Fortress, B-29 Superfortress and a P-51 Mustang.

His contribution

Price prefers not to dwell on his contribution to the war effort.

For starters, he filed a report with the Air Force back in 1943. And it doesn’t seem right to call attention to a civilian mathematician’s tasks while others lost their lives.

But when pressed, Price said he helped figure out plane formations and drop procedures that improved bombing accuracy.

“We found that smaller, tighter (formations) and dropping (bombs) simultaneously improved accuracy,” he said.

Ted Wilson, a KU history professor who has studied World War II, said Price underestimated the section’s contribution.

“They played a very important role,” he said, noting that efforts to improve bombing accuracy played a key role in the military’s efforts to cripple the German economy by bombing key factories.

After the war, Price returned to KU, where he later served as chairman of the mathematics department for 19 years. He retired in 1975.

Price and his wife, Cora Lee Beers Price, a longtime assistant professor of classic literature at KU, have six children. She is 93.

Earlier this year, the Prices donated a collection of their papers, books and photographs to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at KU.