When I saw that a recent TED Talk was on the mathematics of war, I got excited. I was expecting, perhaps, a brief tour of some old standbys, like Lanchester’s Laws, followed by some new and exciting analysis.
Instead, I got to see Sean Gourley state that casualties follow a power law:
This is not news. Physicist — and pacifist — Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953) discovered this relationship many decades ago.