Mathematics and WAR
You
must be thinking how is it possible to apply Mathematics in War; but it is no
wonder that mathematics and its application had been in use in the war. A
1800BC clay tablet of Babylonian culture deal with siege computation: the number
of bricks needed for siege ramps, the volume of earth to be dug etc. During the
siege of Syracuse Archimedes demonstrated his command of full geometry of 3-
dimensions translations and rotations.
Archimedes Burning Mirror
Plutarch writes-
When Archemides began to ply his engines, he
at once shot against the land forces all sorts of missiles, weapons and immense
masses of stone that came down with incredible noise and violence against which
no man could stand; for they knocked down those upon whom they fell in heaps, breaking all
their ranks and files
Archimedes had invented many machines which
were used as engines of war. They were effective in the defense of Syracuse
when it was attacked by the Romans. During the Roman siege of Syracuse,
Archimedes single handedly defended the city y constructing the lenses to focus
the sun’s light on the Roman ship and huge cranes to turn them upside down.
Taratgalia (? 1500-1557) was the first man
to apply mathematics in the artillery. He abandoned the concept of a piecewise
linear trajectory given by Aristotle and developed a new concept while giving
the rules for the art of bombardier. In his book Nova Scientia he described the
new ballistic method and instruments including the first firing tables.
During World War II the military management
in England called on a team of scientists to study the strategic and tactical
problems of air and land defense. The objective of the team was to find out the
most effective allocation of limited military resources to the various military
operations and to the activities within each operation. The success of this
operation gave birth to a new branch of mathematics called Operation
Research.
A variety of mathematical
algorithms are implemented in modern terminal guidance system for missiles and
bombs. Signal Processing, uses of virtual reality visualization technique,
laser guidance by Fourier optics, Global Positioning System are the few use of
mathematics in military operation.
In 1939, John Desmond Bernal wrote:-Science
and warfare have always been most closely linked: in fact, except for a certain
portion of the nineteenth centaury it may be fairly claimed that the majority
of significant technical and scientific advances owe their origin directly to
military or naval requirement.
The sophisticated missiles used by USA in
Iraq war and even to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan were highly based on
mathematical principles.
1 comment:
Very interesting blog post. Thanks for sharing.
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