Mathematics of Terror
The July/August issue of Discover features one of the more controversial articles I’ve done in a while. A group of physicists, mathematicians and economists have applied their skills at modeling seemingly unpredictable systems — Wall Street, for example — to the problem of terror and guerrilla attacks.
Starting with data on conflicts from Colombia to Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, they showed that the size and frequency of terror attacks follow similar patterns regardless of the underlying cultural, political, economic and geographic issues at stake. (There’s a great video presentation by one of the researchers here.)
The next, and far trickier, step is to turn that observation into something people can use in the field. I think as long as there’s resistance to the very notion that math could be of value in showing how human behavior works, the team’s work is going to be a hard sell outside the physics community. What they have on their side is data, and as data gets more and more available and easier to process it’s going to be easier to find the common threads.
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