Mathematics of War

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Tim O'Reilly <tim () oreilly com>
Date: July 24, 2005 6:19:32 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Mathematics of War


A very interesting article in the Economist (subscription required,  
but recently syndicated in a bunch of other papers, so may be  
elsewhere on the web):

http://tinyurl.com/a73bt points to the economist story, which opens:

ON JULY 19th, IraqBodyCount, a group of academics who are attempting  
to monitor the casualties of the conflict in that country, published  
a report suggesting that almost 25,000 civilians have been killed in  
it so far. In other words, 34 a day. But that is an average.  on some  
days the total is lower, and some higher -- occasionally much higher.

It is this variation around the mean that interests Dr. Neil Johnson  
of the University of Oxford and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway  
College, London.  They think it is possible to trace and model the  
development of wars from the patterns of casualties they throw up.

The groundwork for this sort of study was laid by Lewis Fry  
Richardson, a British physicist, with a paper on the mathematics of  
war that was published in 1948....

The outcome was startling:  rather than varying wildly or  
chaotically, the probability of individual wars having particular  
numbers of casualties followed a mathematical relationship known as a  
power law....

Terrorist attacks within G7 countries could be distinguished from  
those inside non-G7 countries by their different indices....

_______________

Meanwhile, there's a related story on Nature:  http://www.nature.com/ 
news/2005/050711/full/050711-5.html

Net, net:  the war in Iraq is approaching the same pattern as the  
long-running war in Colombia.

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Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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