Jean-Baptiste Michel: The mathematics of history

http://www.ted.com What can mathematics say about history? According to TED Fellow Jean-Baptiste Michel, quite a lot. From changes to language to the deadliness of wars, he shows how digitized history is just starting to reveal deep underlying patterns.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate

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[rafelingd]

anyone else thinking: issac asimov the foundation?

[itsmanofpopsicle]

Why the hell would you compare Pearl Harbor and genomes?

[evelinavis]

where I can find wrriten speach?

[samueleishion]

He's comparing the word (or phrase) frequencies in books published in years indicated in the horizontal axis to show what the "trending topics" of those periods of time are. E.g., with more development in biology, there are more books written about genomes now than before. Similarly, Pearl Harbor was far more discussed in books around the time of WW2. Thus, he argues, the fact that we can count and compute these frequencies gives us a mathematical perspective of history.

[George THorizon]

As the Pearl Harbor magnitude goes down with time the genome's grows. Pretty obvious.

[Zed T]

what a handsome man

[CyberFenix000]

Apparently emotions are of no relevance in this regards, seeing as sociological and psychology sciences already predict human behavior, which is in what we are interested. 

[cha00halo]

Sociology is not about quantifying emotions but about how humans organise themselves. Anyway, like I said, you cannot solely rely on numbers to understand the human emotion.

[CyberFenix000]

yea... that is where sociology comes in...

[cha00halo]

It would be impossible to directly measure the chemicals in the anygdala from a long dead King.. Instead a Historian decifers the sources to find out what the people felt. Also, to take a test case, a Historical study was done by a Historian called Engerman which concluded that the lives of Africans under slavery had improved because of the increase in calorie intake and the access to medicine. YET he did not take into account the emotional distress of being torn away from their families.

[CyberFenix000]

what are you talking about? you can quantify emotions. Unless you believe in magic, emotions and our introspection (experience) of emotions are quantified, in layman's terms, it's nothing more that the concentration and the period of time in which certain chemicals activate in the amygdala and end up affecting the limbic system. Also, the only unexpected turns in history are unexpected because of lack of information a person (or group) has, however that is also quantifiable.

[Zaete0chan]

Changing my world view in 4 minutes? Wow.