ABSTRACT

Game theory deals with the mathematical modelling of conflict and cooperation. Formal mathematical analysis of conflict emerged from World War I in the writings of Frederick Lanchester (1868-1946) and Lewis Richardson (1881-1953). Their concerns were sharply distinct-those of war and of peace. Lanchester’s Aircraft in Warfare (1916) examined how to win battles by choice of appropriate strategy such as concentration of forces. Richardson was a pacifist Quaker who, from his Mathematical Psychology of War (1919) onward, attempted to understand the dynamics of arms races and the statistics of outbreaks of war as aids to preventing war.