Mathematical Patterns May Predict Future Terror Attacks
January 11, 2010 by
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Could mathematical equations predict future terror attacks ? Researchers from the University of Miami and other institutions claim to have found patterns in the behavior of insurgencies that can help predict future attacks.
The findings were published in the journal Nature last month. For the study, researchers examined 54,000 attacks across nearly a dozen wars in countries ranging from Iraq to Colombia.
“The sizes and timing of violent events within different insurgent conflicts exhibit remarkable similarities,” they found.
Neil Johnson, study co-author and physics professor at the University of Miami, said the researchers found a pattern to the way insurgents form and break up and the way they spread out deadly attacks.
Less deadly attacks occur far more frequently than deadly ones, which may seem obvious. But the researchers found that the ratio of deadly attacks to less deadly attacks is fairly constant across all modern wars.
“They’re not random,” Johnson told FoxNews.com. “It’s the same for all of these different wars.”
He compared the calibrated chaos of insurgent warfare to the financial markets. As with traders on the stock market, he said, insurgents are making decisions timed for maximum impact.
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