Mathematicians aid war on terror

[Champ]

PISCATAWAY, N.J. (AP) - 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. Consider al-Qaida's attack on New York City and Washington, D.C., three years ago. It required a force of only 20 men armed with box cutters, yet it was so brilliantly conceived, meticulously planned and keenly attuned to global politics that it changed the world.

"Terrorism is a thinking man's game," said terror expert Gordon Woo.

Which is why 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.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2004/10/06/658388-ap.html