Four years ago I wrote a blog post about simple solutions to client problems. The post opens by recounting a conversation with a friend that ended with my friend saying “So, basically you’re recommending division.”

That conversation came back to me recently when I had a similar conversation during a deposition. I had to explain that the highly sophisticated method I used to arrive at a number in my report was to take the ratio of two other numbers.

I don’t always do division for clients. Sometimes I do multiplication, as when a lawyer asked me to compute the momentum of a car. There I had to multiply mass and velocity. (I actually turned down that project because I had a sense there was a lot more to the problem than I was being told.)

Of course real-world problems do not always have trivial solutions. Sometimes getting to the solution is complicated even though the solution itself is simple. And sometimes the solution is complicated because that’s just how things are. You might need something complicated, like a cepstrum analysis, or you might just need arithmetic.

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