Search for the SS Central America: Mathematical Treasure Hunting

In 1857, while carrying passengers and gold from California to New York, the SS Central America sank in a hurricane, taking gold bars and coins worth an estimated 400 million dollars to the ocean bottom almost 8,000 feet below. Some 425 people, including the captain, lost their lives. In 1989, after three summers of effort at sea, the Columbus-America Discovery Group recovered one ton of gold bars and coins from the wreck. In 1985, I was given the task of developing a probability distribution for the location of the Central America. This distribution was used to construct the search plan that found the wreck. The methods used to develop the distribution were based on classical OR techniques and included a combination of historical, statistical, analytic, and subjective methods.