Historical Dynamics

Download or read book Historical Dynamics written by Peter Turchin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.

Download or read book Dynamics of World History written by Christopher Dawson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In scope and in vision Christopher Dawson’s historiography ranks with the work of men like Spengler, Northrop, and Toynbee. Several major themes run through Dawson’s work, but perhaps his most unique contribution was his insistence on the importance of religion in shaping and sustaining civilizations. Religion, Dawson believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of a society’s historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason, Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historic religion of the West. Dawson maintained that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. Dynamics of World History shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible.

Download or read book A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics written by Nicolas Bacaër and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Eugene Wigner stressed, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in the physical sciences and their technological applications. The role of mathematics in the biological, medical and social sciences has been much more modest but has recently grown thanks to the simulation capacity offered by modern computers. This book traces the history of population dynamics---a theoretical subject closely connected to genetics, ecology, epidemiology and demography---where mathematics has brought significant insights. It presents an overview of the genesis of several important themes: exponential growth, from Euler and Malthus to the Chinese one-child policy; the development of stochastic models, from Mendel's laws and the question of extinction of family names to percolation theory for the spread of epidemics, and chaotic populations, where determinism and randomness intertwine. The reader of this book will see, from a different perspective, the problems that scientists face when governments ask for reliable predictions to help control epidemics (AIDS, SARS, swine flu), manage renewable resources (fishing quotas, spread of genetically modified organisms) or anticipate demographic evolutions such as aging.

Download or read book A History of Complex Dynamics written by Daniel S. Alexander and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary study of complex dynamics, which has flourished so much in recent years, is based largely upon work by G. Julia (1918) and P. Fatou (1919/20). The goal of this book is to analyze this work from an historical perspective and show in detail, how it grew out of a corpus regarding the iteration of complex analytic functions. This began with investigations by E. Schröder (1870/71) which he made, when he studied Newton's method. In the 1880's, Gabriel Koenigs fashioned this study into a rigorous body of work and, thereby, influenced a lot the subsequent development. But only, when Fatou and Julia applied set theory as well as Paul Montel's theory of normal families, it was possible to develop a global approach to the iteration of rational maps. This book shows, how this intriguing piece of modern mathematics became reality.

Download or read book The Historical Dynamics of Chinese Politics written by Guangbin Yang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-02 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book puts forward a new perspective, the historical dynamics of Chinese politics, for better understanding China’s politics, which is from the vertical history of China and the dimension of horizontal world politics, combining the historical analysis of how Chinese politics has come along the way and the comparative analysis of China's governance achievements in world politics. Based on this premise, this book attempts to explain the democratic discourse of contemporary Chinese political logic. The historical dynamics of Chinese politics comes from long-term communication between the author and Western scholars, which may help the global audience to understand China’s politics from all angles.

Download or read book History & Mathematics written by Leonid E. Grinin and published by ООО "Издательство "Учитель". This book was released on with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Yearbook ‘History and Mathematics’ has already celebrated its 10th anniversary and has confidently entered its second decade. The common feature of all our Yearbooks, including the present volume, is the usage of formal methods and social studies methods intheir synthesis to analyze different historical phenomena. The present Yearbook (which is the seventh in the series) is subtitled ‘Big History Aspects’. This issue is devoted to the problems of evolutionary development of the world. In no way will it be a digression from the direction which we have initially defined for ourYearbook, but just an extension of the scope of the research. The matter is that there are two kinds of history: the history of nature (or more exactly the Universe and the Earth) and the history of humans and mankind. It is not surprising that the idea of historicism penetrated almost every scientific field. At the same time the search for common foundations of this endless in its diversity world has intensified. One of the directions of this interdisciplinary search for the unity of the world in its diversity is Universal Evolutionism (Big History). Mathematical and formal methods help to understand much deeply both natural and human history. This issue of the Yearbook consists of four main sections: (I) Patterns of Big History; (II) Hypotheses of Deep Big History; (III) Biological Aspects; (IV) History and Future of Social Systems. We hope that this issue will be interesting and useful both for historians and mathematicians, as well as for all those dealing with various social and natural sciences.

Download or read book History & Mathematics written by Grinin, Leonid and published by ООО "Издательство "Учитель". This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present yearbook (which is the fourth in the series) is subtitled Trends & Cycles. It is devoted to cyclical and trend dynamics in society and nature; special attention is paid to economic and demographic aspects, in particular to the mathematical modeling of the Malthusian and post-Malthusian traps' dynamics. An increasingly important role is played by new directions in historical research that study long-term dynamic processes and quantitative changes. This kind of history can hardly develop without the application of mathematical methods. There is a tendency to study history as a system of various processes, within which one can detect waves and cycles of different lengths – from a few years to several centuries, or even millennia. The contributions to this yearbook present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of global historical, political, economic and demographic processes, as well as their mathematical models. This issue of the yearbook consists of three main sections: (I) Long-Term Trends in Nature and Society; (II) Cyclical Processes in Pre-industrial Societies; (III) Contemporary History and Processes. We hope that this issue of the yearbook will be interesting and useful both for historians and mathematicians, as well as for all those dealing with various social and natural sciences.