Q&A: What's math got to do with peace?
Larry Liebovitch is a professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Psychology at Queens College, and at the Physics Program of the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is also a core faculty member of the Sustaining Peace Project at the Earth Institute's Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4). He recently developed a mathematical model simulation of sustainable peace in a society. In this mathematical model, users respond to a series of questions about a community by plugging in values for different factors that research suggests are important to sustaining peace. Examples of these factors include the degree to which leaders model peaceful values and the degree to which information flows freely between members of all groups in a society. The model then shows where the system of factors might end up over time—heading to war or situated in peace—offering a tool for...