A talk by David A. Meyer, George W. and Carol A. Lattimer Campus Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of California/San Diego. Presented by the Department of Physics, in conjunction with the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship and the Distinguished Visitors Program.
Lewis Fry Richardson, Quaker scientist and mathematician, famously studied the Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Since his pioneering work of almost a century ago, conflict data at much finer detail than total casualties in a particular quarrel has become available. Analysis of the timeseries of violent events in several contexts suggests that they may share universal, quantitative features, specifically a kind of statistical self-similarity that Richardson observed in an entirely different context, measuring the length of a coastline. This empirical result has important consequences for understanding the effectiveness of strategies for mitigating violent conflict. It also supports heuristic explanations for continuing conflict based upon collective memories, which are independently supported by quantitative analysis of other novel datasets, search engine query logs.
