Description

ABSTRACT

A review of literature shows that a diaspora of natural scientists interested in history has been forming for some time around the legacy of Rashevsky, Richardson, and Tilly. Analytical history of Bertrand Roehmer and Tony Syme, as well as the study of patterns of military conflicts by Peter Brecke, have a potential of becoming centers of the “naturalization” of historical research.
The existing formal approaches to complex systems create a conundrum of the use of closed mathematical structures for representing open irreversible systems. Pattern Theory (Ulf Grenander) is suggested as another entry in the inventory of methods in this area.
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A possibility to treat a segment of history as a quasi-chemical structural transformation through alternating stable and irregular states is illustrated on the example of the expedition of Darius against the Scyths.