Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I The uses of abstraction
- II Meditations on measurement
- 5 Biology in a darkened room
- 6 Physics in a darkened room
- 7 Subtle is the Lord
- 8 A Quaker mathematician
- 9 Richardson on war
- III The pleasures of computation
- IV Enigma variations
- V The pleasures of thought
- Appendix 1 Further reading
- Appendix 2 Some notations
- Appendix 3 Sources
- Bibliography
- Index
- Acknowledgements
9 - Richardson on war
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I The uses of abstraction
- II Meditations on measurement
- 5 Biology in a darkened room
- 6 Physics in a darkened room
- 7 Subtle is the Lord
- 8 A Quaker mathematician
- 9 Richardson on war
- III The pleasures of computation
- IV Enigma variations
- V The pleasures of thought
- Appendix 1 Further reading
- Appendix 2 Some notations
- Appendix 3 Sources
- Bibliography
- Index
- Acknowledgements
Summary
Arms and insecurity
During the last 25 years of his life, Richardson's main scientific interest was the study of the causes of war. To most people, any attempt to apply the methods of mathematics to such a complex social phenomenon appears doomed from the start. The two books which he wrote on the subject failed to find a publisher during his lifetime and it was not until seven years after his death that they were published with the help of a subsidy from the Littauer Foundation. (In fact, both books had to be reprinted and the royalties more than covered the subsidy.)
The first, entitled Arms and Insecurity, is an attempt to produce a mathematical theory of arms races. The mathematics used is not very hard and can be explained to anyone who has done a couple of years of calculus. (If you have not, just skip this part of the discussion.) Consider two nations who spend at a rate x(t) and y(t) (measured, for example, in dollars per year) on armaments at time t. The first nation will tend to increase its expenditure in response to the perceived threat of the expenditure of its rival, but will be restrained by the burden that its own expenditure represents. The greater y(t) is, the greater the rate of increase of x(t) but the greater x(t) is, the smaller the increase.
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- Information
- The Pleasures of Counting , pp. 194 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996