Math, Science, Technology, and War
By Ralph Abraham
Wednesday August 11, 1999

A proposed project for 
Grade 11 Integrated Studies , Unit VI: European Crisis, Spring 2000 
of Tim's rough schema of August 10, 1999

Domains:  Math, Science, Wellness, Media, Cultural History
Time frame: World War I to World War II
Geography: Europe and the USA
Abstract:: How can we understand the 20th century without coming to grips with the atomic bomb, the computer, and the roles of math, science, and technology in the great wars? Here I propose an approach based on the biographies of key figures.
Activities: Students will work in teams or individually to prepare reports on individuals or teams of the specified fields involved within the space-time frame in the war and peace spheres. Here are some examples, all of the generation of my parents, that I came to know in my professional work. Following the presentation of all the student projects to the whole class, there might follow a brainstorming session on the sense of it all, the ethics of science, the future, etc.
Lewis Frye Richardson
Richardson was a physicist involved with meteorology before the first war. His program for weather prediction was the most accurate of his time, and was used in England until recently. As a Quaker, he objected to military service, and was drafted as a consciensous objector in the first war. He served in the ambulance corps, and thus saw much grisle, and decided to devote the rest of his life to the prevention of war. His model for war created the field of erodynamics, aka system dynamics and social physics, as described in my book, Chaos, Gaia, Eross. The rejection of his work prompted his life long efforts to justify his model on the basis of actual data, which gave rise to the field of politicometrics. He lived to see the second war give further validation to his model, following which his works, such as The Statistics of Deadly Quarels,  were published posthumously. His model for war was adopted by Gregory Bateson as a model for schizophrenia, and research following his ideas continues today. (Eg, recent papers by Mayer-Kress and myself.) These models may be easily simulated using the STELLA program in our own tech room.

Ludwik Fleck
Fleck was a child during the first war, became an important microbiologist, and was taken to Auschwitz during the second war. From the security of his laboratory window, he saw his family taken away to the gas chambers, while he continued his research on the prevention and cure of STDs such as syphilis. Between the wars he wrote his book, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact,  which began the study of the sociology of science and introduced the important idea of paradigm shift, or catastrophic bifurcation, in the sciences. In this book he analyzed, as the paradigmatic case of paradigm shift, the Wasserman test for syphilis, that is, the interaction of bacteria and the immune system in disease etiology. He survived the war and returned to his home town near Bonn.

Samuel Rashevsky
Rashevsky made a daring escape, with his wife, from the Russian Revolution. Landing eventually in Chicago, he created the field of mathematical biology, began a graduate program which continues today as one of the best in this field, applied the ideas of that subject to world cultural history in hopes of promoting the cause of peace, and was the first to identify catastrophic bifurcation as a mathematical model for war.
John von Neuman
Von Neuman, like Fleck, was a Jewish child during the first war. Unlike Fleck, he escaped the holocaust to safety in the US. Following his early work on the foundations of quantum mechanics (which I studied as a graduate student) he founded mathematical  economics.  He then became one of the main inventors of digital computers, as well as of the atomic bomb. Following the war he invented game theory. Toward the end of his life he wrote about robots that could reproduce themselves, and speculated on the similarity of computers and brains. He died prematurely just as my own career began.

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