The Mathematics of Terrorism | Math | DISCOVER Magazine

The Mathematics of Terrorism | Math | DISCOVER Magazine: "Soon the new team had a database that included more than 20,000 separate incidents from two and a half decades of FARC attacks. Johnson and Spagat expected that the success of the attacks, measured in the number of people killed, would cluster around a certain figure: There would be a few small attacks and a few large ones as outliers on either end, but most attacks would pile up in the middle. Visually, that distribution forms a bell curve, a shape that represents everything from height (some very short people, some very tall, most American men about 5'10') to rolls of the dice (the occasional 2 or 12, but a lot of 6s, 7s, and 8s). Bell curves are called normal distribution curves because this is how we expect the world to work much of the time. But the Colombia graph looked completely different. When the researchers plotted the number of attacks along the y (vertical) axis and people killed along the x (horizontal) axis, the result was a line that plunged down and then levelled off. At the top were lots of tiny attacks; at the bottom were a handful of huge ones."