I recently watched a video on a website called TED. (This is the link to read my article about TED.com http://www.webupon.com/Web-Talk/Tedcom.719173) The video was in titled Mathematics of War. The title may seem like an odd one but it was in fact the title of the video. The speaker was Sean Gourley and he and a group of 5 other scientists set out on a mission to relate mathematics and war together. The result, a revolution in the way to calculate the probability of an attack and the number dead or wounded. They even came up with an equation to represent this:

P(x) =Cx^-a

Let’s break down this equation. P equals the probability of the attack. X equals the number killed or wounded. The a is equal to -a (-alpha) and represents the slope of the line, when a making a graph. A is also equal to the organizational structure. And C equals the constant. The constant is the part that brings it all together. The six scientists involved in this mission also graphed each attack, and found something that is rather interesting. The slope of the line is directly proportional to the strength of the group that attacked.

If the group is Fragmented it is weaker and if the group is Coalescence the group is stronger. Now to you these may seem a little out there but when the scientists graphed certain areas of the world such as Iraq they found something eerie. When you made a best fit line, it created a perfectly straight line. Meaning that as I said earlier the strength of the group is directly proportional to the slope.

But this would mean that there is order in war. Can that even be possible? Well apparently it can, Sean and his team compared the graph they made for Iraq to a graph form Afghanistan and Columbia. They found the same thing, a perfectly straight line that corresponds to the strength of the group. Not a random placement of dots but a straight line. This sent shivers down my spine when I watched the video. This is probably going to fly under the radar for a few years but someone will bring this idea back for the world to see.