Elaine Scarry, the Harvard English professor, applied the kind of close-reading normally reserved for literary scholarship to phone calls and official reports related to the hijacked airplanes, and has since written several books about national security. Yaneer Bar-Yam and Kawandeep Virdee of the New England Complex Systems Institute built a mathematical model to predict the location of attacks by insurgents in Afghanistan. Michael Johnson, a biologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, started developing antibiotics that would be useful against anthrax and other potential bioweapons. John Jost, a social psychologist at New York University, studied the effect of terrorism on the ideological inclinations of the people it targets. (He found that it makes them more conservative. )
What follows is a sample of the research and thought that have been undertaken as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks. By no means should it be taken as an attempt at a comprehensive survey—nor even as a “best of.” Some questions remain maddeningly unanswerable, but 10 years later, this snapshot gives a sense of the countless ways that 9/11 changed not just how we engage with the world, but what we know about it.
The mathematics of terror As a national event, the Sept. 11 attacks weren’t just unusual—they felt impossibly random, something that could never have been predicted. Aaron Clauset, at that time, was just a young math whiz who was only starting to think about applying to graduate school. By the time he entered the computer science program at University of New Mexico a year later, Clauset had developed an interest in the math used to describe so-called complex systems— think anthills and social networks—and wondered whether the same tools might help detect large-scale patterns in unexpected places.
