I thought you might enjoy this.
In his paper (Who Solved the Secretary Problem? Statist. Sci., Volume 4, Number 3 (1989), 282-289) Thomas Ferguson tells the following funny story.
"When the celebrated German astronomer, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), lost his first wife to cholera in 1611, he set about finding a new wife using the same methodical thoroughness and careful consideration of the data that he used in finding the orbit of Mars to be an ellipse. His first, not altogether happy, marriage had been arranged for him, and this time he was determined to make his own decision. In a long letter to a Baron Strahlendorf on October 23, 1613, written after he had made his selection, he describes in great detail the problems he faced and the reasons behind each of the decisions he made. He arranged to interview and to choose from among no fewer than eleven candidates for his hand. The process consumed much of his attention and energy for nearly 2 years, what with the investigations into the virtues and drawbacks of each candidate, her dowry, negotiations with her parents, natural hesitations, the advice of friends, etc. The book of Arthur Koestler (1960) contains an entertaining and insightful exposition of the process. The book of Carola Baumgardt (1951) contains much supplementary information.
Suffice it to say that of the eleven candidates interviewed, Kepler eventually decided on the fifth. It may be noted that when $n = 11$, the function $\phi_n(r)$ of (2.1) takes on its maximum value when $r = 5$. Perhaps, if Kepler had been aware of the theory of the secretary problem, he could have saved himself a lot of time and trouble." Fortunately,
"His new wife, whose education, as he says in his letter, must take the place of a dowry, bore him seven children, ran his household efficiently, and seems to have provided the necessary tranquil homelife for his erratic genius to flourish."Ferguson has many other interesting things in his paper. It created some controversy and amusement when published because his answer to the question "Who Solved the Secretary Problem?" is "Nobody"! He then goes on to "solve" it for the first time! (at least a particular version he likes). He also says:
"As historians, we should take as the secretary problem, the problem as it first appeared in print, in Martin Gardner's February 1960 column in Scientific American, where it was called the game of googol and described as follows.Ask someone to take as many slips of paper as he pleases, and on each slip write a different positive number. The numbers may range from small fractions of 1 to a number the size of a googol (1 followed by a hundred 0's) or even larger. These slips are turned face down and shuffled over the top of a table. One at a time you turn the slips face up. The aim is to stop turning when you come to the number that you guess to be the largest of the series. You cannot go back and pick up a previously turned slip. If you turn over all slips, then of course you must pick the last one turned.The astute reader may notice that this is not the simple form of the secretary problem described in Section 2. The actual values of the numbers are revealed to the decision maker in violation of condition 4. Also, there is this "someone" who chooses the numbers, presumably to make your problem of selecting the largest as difficult as possible. The game of googol is really a two-person game."
