By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social
[J]ust recently, people were saying that today’s warfare was a confrontation of technologies. Today, I have already heard our participants in combat operations saying that today’s warfare is a “war of mathematicians.”
Who said that? The answer is given towards the end of my post.
In my previous post, I discussed the ethical issues I grappled with, starting back in 2001, when, shortly after the September 11 airplane terrorist attack on New York City’s World Trade Center (the “Twin Towers”) and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., I was invited to join a multi-year research project funded by the US National Security Agency. The goal was to find ways to improve defense intelligence analysis. That goal was a laudable one, and I had no problem signing up.
That project led to a second multi-year project (indirectly) for the US Navy, on processing video-data gathered by drone flights over enemy territory in the Middle East. Neither project was classified, and I did not have security clearance. The mathematics I would be developing for the Navy was essentially the same as for the NSA project, namely, part of the pursuit of a mathematical theory of information from a semantics perspective. (The work that had brought me to the US in 1987.)
[The well-known “information theory”, developed by Bell Labs mathematician Claude Shannon in the 1940s and published in 1948, focused exclusively on syntax, in particular the signal-transmission capacity of a particular electronic channel. My focus was on the informational content of such a transmission. The approach I adopted was the one developed by researchers at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), where I had relocated from the UK in 1987, following my politically-based, cost-cutting “ejection” from my UK university. The CSLI approach did in fact make use of Shannon’s work.]
Still, that second project did cause me some initial reflection, since I would be working on “weapons of war”. I summarized the ethical position I settled on in my previous Angle post. I maintained that position in a third project I subsequently took on for the US Army, to provide real-time intelligence analysis tools for small, “Special Ops” group missions operating in enemy territory, the goal being to minimize loss of life by the troops and local civilian populations. Though only a short pilot project, that one brought home the nature of the work, since the data I was working on comprised fictional mission scenarios used for training military analysts. Though the goal of my work was to protect lives, the overall project goal clearly involved killing people. Again, my previous post outlined my rationale for engaging in that project.
[Interestingly, although the research I did was not classified, I was asked on each occasion to please avoid writing about it in research journals or (even more so) public outlets such as Devlin’s Angle. That reflected the high degree of security that the military and governmental personnel I interacted with brought to their work. I was impressed by both their professionalism and their ethics. It was in sharp contrast to the approach adopted by today’s US administration, where details of missions are discussed openly on social media and broadcast television. Though it does mean I feel under no institutional pressure to avoid writing about my DoD work, I still refrain from going into details, given my personal view of National Security and the respect I still have for the professionals I interacted with. Times change; in this case, not for the better, in my view. As a citizen, I accept that elected governments call the shots and set the tone, but I still feel bound to the commitments I made back when I was working on those projects.]
But (as is frequently the case on this blog), I digress. After my last essay was published, I received an email from a reader the UK (we have met, and occasionally exchange ideas) alerting me to a recently published paper by Alexandre Borovik, a retired mathematician from the University of Manchester (where I taught briefly back in the 1970s), titled The Tool/Weapon Duality of Mathematics and published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Vol 16, Issue 1, January 2026.
Some of what Borovik writes is familiar to me, but he took his own reflections on working on projects with military relevance and extended them by researching the literature. It was his paper from which I took, not only the title for this post, but also the question quotation I began with. Those words were spoken by Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking to journalists and media executives from BRICS countries on 18 October 2024.
[Given that source, the current US government’s assault on universities and their slashing of research funds (all of which the UK government did in the 1980s when I was a casualty) seems particularly unwise. But again, we get the administration the People elect.]
I urge you to read Borovik’s paper. It’s a mere 24 pages long, plus five pages of highly useful references. It’s all highly relevant to American-based mathematicians today, some of whom will (assuming we remain a democracy and there is a change of government) undoubtedly find themselves facing a decision like the one I did back in the first decade of the 21st Century. Vladimir Putin was correct. And yes, I just wrote that. In an essay about mathematics.
I’ll end with a quotation from Borovik:
Mathematics, as we know it, was born as a weapon of subjugation and tyrannic control.
He brings the historical receipts to back up that statement. Though I was peripherally familiar with the historical events it refers to (particularly the beginnings of arithmetic in Sumeria over five thousand years ago, which I have written about in some of my books), the starkness of his assertion made me jolt. Facts have a habit of doing that.
FOOTNOTE: If you are curious about my own research on information that brought me into National Security issues, I just made a short (16min) summary video to show at a lecture I am giving at Southern Denmark University (Odense, Denmark) in early June, where I will focus on recent subsequent work on applying the same framework to issues of healthcare.