Mathematical Terrorism

Mathematical research of terrorism is a nascent area of applied mathematics with the power to inform both political scientists and policy makers. This compilation surveys from this emerging area: (1) an ordinary-differential equations model of a terrorist organization focused on evaluating various counter-terrorism measures and predicting the evolution of sub-state conflicts; (2) a model of nuclear smuggling based on Markov chains over transportation networks and algorithms for positioning interception arrays on the network; (3) an alternative formulation of nuclear smuggling with application to general sensing problems and fast approximation algorithms with performance guarantees; (4) a model of cascade-resilient networks, with implications to the structure of terrorist networks and the design of infrastructure networks. Research into such models promises to advance applied mathematics by introducing both challenging new problems and innovative methods.