Although the events of 9/11 might seem random and unexpected, former SFI Omidyar Fellow Aaron Clauset believes they were somewhat predictable, he says in a Boston Globe article summarizing what we’ve learned about terrorism since 9/11.
In analyzing over 13,000 terrorism incidents worldwide in the last 40 years, Clauset found that the likelihood of a terrorist strike between 1968 and 2006 with at least as many lives lost as 9/11 was about 23 percent. He conducted much of his research during his Omidyar Fellowship at SFI.
“This does not mean that 9/11 was a certainty,” says Clauset, now an assistant professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, studying patterns in terrorism, macroevolution, and other complex systems, “but it does illustrate that an event of that size is not all that surprising given the historical record of terrorism in the late 20th century.”
Read the Boston Globearticle (September 11, 2011)
Clauset discusses this research in his blog "Structure & Strangeness."