Mathematics and war: an invitation to revisit. (Q1411669)

The authors discuss the relationship of mathematics and war. The reviewer remembers numerous business meetings of the American Mathematical Society in which resolutions were considered not to engage in ``war work'' (e.g. ``Star Wars''). The authors naturally concentrate on the European situation, and ``mathematical war research has resulted in certain fundamental theoretical innovations''; think of names like Turing, von Neumann, Shannon, Pontryagin (control theory). Of course there were also figures like G. H. Hardy, Laurent Schwartz, and Lewis Fry Richardson (who developed the idea mathematically that arms races cause wars). (Richardson was a Quaker.) While mathematics in and of itself is ethically neutral, the mathematician makes ethical choices in any particular situation that presents itself and these choices are not ethically neutral. For example, Jerzy Neyman was apparently a vocal advocate of the ethical neutrality of the mathematics he did, and Marian Rejewski welcomed the opportunity to decode (an early version of) the German Enigma code. Reason in the service of purely technical rationality can be ``morally disfiguring''; the authors believe that mathematics has been used for such disfigurement since the ``mathematization of warfare'' casts a veil of rationality over the actions of war (for example, ``smart bombs''). The reviewer disagrees with the author's characterization of the Oberwolfach Institute. That the military uses of mathematics were the \textit{ostensible} reason for its creation in 1944 is certainly true, but an examination of the first mathematicians to find refuge there during World War II shows that its actual use by Süss was first to rescue mathematicians.