Booß-Bavnbek B., Høyrup J. (eds.) Mathematics and War

Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003. — 417 p.In this moment of writing, the whole world is waiting for an announced war; at the moment of reading, there is scarce hope the war will not have taken place or be still in course. This is the raison d'être of the present volume.
"Mathematics and war" may seem a peculiar topic when war seems so much more important than mathematics. Importance, however, is concrete, and one of the facets which brings forth and shapes contemporary warfare is its profound mathematization. Therefore, a discussion of war which omits mathematics is bound to miss many points. Reversely, a discussion of mathematics which neglects its actual involvement in war and warfare may also miss quite a few essential points.
Mathematization, however, is also a global and rather abstract description, which on its part must be understood concretely. The papers collected in the volume therefore take up a number of different but mutually related issues, some of them historical, some of them philosophical, some of them concerned with the functioning of weapons and with the actual planning and conduct of war, some of them with the mental impact of the mathematization of fighting on the general population as well as on the fighting crews. Some of the contributions are written from a more or less outspokenly pacifist perspective, others are not. Some of the historically oriented papers deal with personal history, others with military history or the social and institutional history of mathematics; but the history focuses strongly on the last sixty or seventy years.
The reason for this is, on one hand, that our primary motivation has been ethical and aimed at understanding the actual state of the world - the main purpose of the book is not the gaining of pure theoretical insight but to gather valid knowledge that may be used in the situation where the human race is actually navigating; on the other, that the interaction between mathematics and warfare changed dramatically with World War II - indeed that the reasons that make understanding of this interaction practically urgent only came into being with World War II.
The general issues which are touched on are not covered broadly. Even this has its reasons. For one thing, "mathematics and war" is a relatively new interest, at least as a confined research field; broad generalizations must therefore wait until detailed studies are at hand (in the introduction, the editors permit themselves not to follow this wise rule). Moreover, each detailed study fills out a number of pages, and the volume can hold only a limited number of pages. For the purpose of understanding the world and reflecting upon what can be done now, the studies contained in the volume and the multitude of perspectives they represent should be useful as points of orientation in a domain that is in need of further development. For this purpose we see it as no disadvantage that many of the studies combine the presentation of factual information and reflection with moral or political stances. At least in their combination, they should approach Weberian Wertfreiheit.
Evidently, the editors have thought about which further perspectives could contribute to the global picture. One important theme, though touched at indirectly in several contributions, deserves in-depth investigation on its own: the relation between the public sphere and its institutions (including the media), general mental attitudes about supposedly clinically-rational technology, and the genuine or pretended mathematical rationality of modern warfare.Perspectives from Mathematics
Military Work in Mathematics 1914-1945: An Attempt at an International Perspective
The Brains behind the Enigma Code Breaking before the Second World War
On the Defence Work of A.N. Kolmogorov during World War II
Improbable Warriors: Mathematicians Grace Hopper and Mina Rees in World War II
New Mathematical Disciplines and Research in the Wake of World War II
Mathematics and War in Japan
Discovery of the Maximum Principle in Optimal Control
Mickey Flies the Stealth
Perspectives from the Military
War Cannot Be Calculated
Warfare Can Be Calculated
Duels of Systems and Forces
On Facts and Fiction of "Information Warfare"
More or Less Exposed Non-combatants and Civilian Objects under the Conditions of "Modern Warfare"
Ethical Issues
Niels Bohr's Political Crusade during World War II
The Military Use of Alan Turing
The Mathematician K. Ogura and the "Greater East Asia War"
Working within the System
Ethics and Military Research
Enlightenment Perspectives
Mathematical Thinking and International Law
Calculated Security? Mathematical Modelling of Conflict and Cooperation