Mathematicians Offer Help in Terror Fight

[Khephra]

PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- A small group of thinking men and women convened at Rutgers University last month to consider how order theory -- a branch of abstract mathematics that deals with hierarchical relationships -- could be applied to the war on terror.

It almost seems ridiculous for people who inhabit a world of concept lattices and partially ordered sets to think they can affect a war that is being fought on the streets of Baghdad and in the remote mountains of northern Pakistan. But the war on terror is also fought in cyberspace, and in the minds of people from Lahore to Los Angeles. Mathematicians are right at home in such abstract realms.

"It's not just theoretical," said Fred Roberts, director of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, the Rutgers research institute where the conference was held.

Terrorism takes brains. You don't need political influence, military might or economic resources to plant bombs or take hostages; but without brains, terrorism is nothing more than random violence."

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-math-against-terror,0,3686676.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

[kiahzero]

1. That's quite nifty

Poor mathematicians will have to find something new with no practical application, now. :D

[bemildred]

2. Eh, submarine hunting in WWII.

And Crypto.

The problem with what these guys are doing, which IS interesting,
is that you need to be better than the available expert humans or
you just have an expensive and brittle way to do what can already
be done. Of course, these systems can also provide useful input
for said expert humans.