December 5, 2003

A Mathematical Method for Assessing Whether a Terrorist Cell Has Been Broken; the Perversity of the U.S. Electoral College

By DAVID GLENN

GEOMETRY FOR G-MEN: When FBI agents arrest a few members of a terrorist cell, how can they know if the cell has been disabled?

Several scholars have brought mathematical tools to bear on that crucial question. Social scientists have imagined individual terrorists as nodes on a graph, most of whom are connected to only one or two other nodes. Using such cellular graphs, the scholars have proposed ways of estimating whether a chain of relationships has been effectively shattered, even