The Fear of All Sums

The sheer unpredictability of an act of terror or even the fear of terrorism is enough to impact on our everyday lives and livelihoods.

We rely heavily on the preventative actions and intelligence gathering of the secret services and police and the sanctions available through the law courts.

Currently the respective security forces in nations under threat for whatever reason give the impression that they are coping in terms of personnel and resources. In other regimes there is a strong military emphasis intended to curb or keep in check the activities of those intent on making a statement outside of normal, reasonable channels.

However, circumstances can change as has been more than evident over recent months with loners or small terror cells particularly active.

An unusual new weapon is being increasingly deployed in the battle against terrorism. Mathematics.

Academics have been looking for many years at data, analytical tools, physics and complex systems revolving around terrorism and although events may seem random and chaotic due to a number of factors of human decision making such a detailed study has produced some defined and surprising patterns which appear to contradict longstanding perceptions.

The theory concentrating the minds and efforts of mathematicians is that understanding the frequency of small events can permit the forecasting and probability of a large event.

It may be the case that the big picture has not really been considered before and that hidden maths patterns may just have been cloaked or camouflaged if the sample study has been too small and restricted.

Morbidly but nevertheless fascinating has been the plotting of thirty thousand separate terror acts over the last forty years.

The representative graph of the number of fatalities for each of the events cannot attempt to illustrate the tragic consequences for individuals, communities, ethnic groups and nations but the appearance of a defined power log distribution proved shocking for those compiling the data. The pattern is even more surprising as it includes not only mathematics but also social, biological and scientific influences.

We are all familiar with normal distribution patterns. As part of a typical junior school curriculum we have all compiled a graph showing the spread of heights of our classmates.This Bell Curve profile has a peak and spread either side and a close range of values.

The mathematical approach to terrorist acts is not however a typical distribution.

An attack could claim the lives of a single person or, as in the case of  9/11 many thousands. Behind the plotted data there has appeared a simple equation and relationship. This is in spite of the 40 year duration of gathered information, the changes in global politics and the motivation that spawns and changes the terror groups themselves.

There should not be any element of persistence in a pattern...but there is.

Furthermore, in the modelling process the pattern has proven to be robust.

Early published academic works on this phenomena found it very difficult to be taken seriously. The interest and attentions of mathematicians in politics, science and violent acts was seen as strange and somewhat inappropriate by Government Departments and funding and sponsorship was not forthcoming.

It appears that the theory was just not comprehended but yet in other disciplines such as the forecasting of when and where earthquakes and tsunamis may strike it was well established.  The same level of prediction for acts of terror is adopted in the everyday activity of weather forecasting. For example, interest in the progress of a rain band can lead to reasonable predictions of actual rainfall in a certain regional location, a trend that can be expressed as a percentage possibility.

The US Marine Corps began to take an interest in what the mathematicians could do and this opened up the funding route from other Governments and their Agencies.

The likelihood of a major terrorism event, after numbers have been crunched, in the next 10 years is 30%, which is uncomfortably high.

This revelation is a consequence of detailed analysis and has shown that the same pattern of timings has occurred between terrorist acts in all of the global hotspots over the sample decades.

In the UK how confident can such a prediction process be?.

It cannot, by definition, pinpoint an actual date, day or time but rather identify a trend which may cover a matter of days, weeks or months.

The quality of the input data is of course a critical aspect. It is drawing on a constant stream of intelligence gleaned from conventional methods of espionage and monitoring but also from social media and covert operations, on behalf of but with or without the knowledge or consent or a population.

Increasingly we may feel that we are in a war zone. It is a matter of how much of our privacy and freedom we are willing to give up in order to keep behind the front line and safe.