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Today is Rememberance Day here in Canada, and I've been thinking about "war and war's alarms", to quote Yeats. One of the books I've been dipping into a lot lately is Thomas W. Körner's wonderful The Pleasures of Counting (also available in paperback ). Really, I can't recommend this enough.

What follows is somewhat statistical and mathematical. I hope that the reader who studies the numbers will see that there is a story worthy of some silent contemplation. For those who seek something different on this Remeberance Day, I offer a soldier and master storyteller's perspective: try A Soldier of the Great War.

One of Körner's inspirations was the Quaker mathematician and pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson, a brilliantly original thinker, whom we can thank for numerical weather forecasting, among many other things.

One of Richardson's deep interests was War, chiefly because he believed that in understanding War objectively and scientifically, humanity might be able to prevent wars. (This is a thirdhand distillation of an evidently tremendously thoughtful and complex man, so this is at best a gross oversimplification, if not downright wrong). Richardson spent decades gathering statistics and creating a framework or model for studying conflict. Körner describes this painstaken labour and summarizes the results that Richardson accumulated between 1941 and his death in 1953.

The death tolls reported for the 'deadly quarrels' in the period of Richardson's study (1820 -- 1929) varied so widely among the available historical sources that one might as well consider the log to the base 10, rounded to one decimal place. This quantity he calls the magnitude of the conflict. Hence, a magnitude 7.3 quarrel is one in which roughly 20 million, plus or minus about 5 million, died. It seems absurd that the estimates of number of deaths should vary by as much as 20%, yet these appear to be the best efforts of historians.

To give a little perspective, according to Levitt and Dubner in Freakonomics , the number of dependent children of U.S. taxpayers dropped by seven million in 1987, after the IRS changed the rules to require that each dependent be listed with a Social Security number. Even in the relatively high-tech, database-driven world that was beginning to emerge in 1987, some statistics are difficult to get accurate estimates of.

I've started gathering some statistics of my own, collected from wikipedia and presented as an MIT Simile project exhibit. This is very much a work in progress - the statistics need to be cleaned up an expanded, and there are a number of bugs in the exhibit presentation javascript that I need to fix or work around. However, I hope that this will eventually give cause for some reflection.

Richardson's data, summarized by Körner is as follows:

The number of conflicts grows quite rapidly as one considers smaller magnitudes, but it becomes increasingly difficult to document these as smaller conflicts are often not systematically recorded.

This is graphed in the following:

What I found to be interesting was the total number of deaths, grouped by magnitude of conflict in which they occurred:

The one conflict listed of magnitude 7 plus or minus 1/2, namely the first world war, accounts for nearly three times the total casualties of the conflicts of magnitude 6. These in turn are over twice the number of casualties arising from conflicts of magnitude 5, etc.