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The Mathematics of National Security
When not teaching differential equations, professor applies mathematics towards national defense.
The interests of mathematician Julian Palmore range from random variables to the use of game theory in testing strategies for national security.
Chances are, if you encountered Julian Palmore while studying at the University of Illinois, it was through one of his courses on differential equations, probability, or even chaos theory. As a professor of mathematics for three decades, Palmore has guided students through the slippery slopes of Hilbert Space and random variables to convergence, continuity, and completeness.
But to get a complete picture of Palmore, you must go beyond his affiliation with the Department of Mathematics and consider the sum of the professor's parts—which are indeed multiple and varied.
After earning an engineering physics degree at Cornell University in 1961, Palmore joined the Navy and was assigned to NASA's Apollo program, where he was charged with developing rocket boosters.
"I had been interested in rockets and that sort of thing in college, and even before," says Palmore, who developed that interest further by studying aeronautical engineering at Princeton University, and later, astronomy at Yale. After postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota, the not-to-be-pigeonholed Palmore decided to spread his wings in a slightly different, but related, direction.
"I decided I really wanted to go into mathematics," Palmore continues, "so I wound up at Princeton as a visiting fellow for a year, and then went to the University of California at Berkeley and got Ph.D. number two" in 1973. He joined the U of I math faculty in 1977.
Through the years, Palmore's interest in rockets, military and defense operations, and national security issues continued to percolate. In 1989, he began working—through the University—at the U.S. Army's Champaign-based Construction Engineering Research Laboratory.
His work with CERL on projects for the Army, Navy, and Air Force ultimately prepared him for what has become an academic sideline: serving as a professor in the LAS's Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security (ACDIS). Through ACDIS, Palmore co-teaches Math 351, "Technology and Security—Preventive Defense against Weapons of Mass Destruction." The course introduces students to the quantitative study of security problems facing the United States, focusing on threats posed by all manner of weapons of mass destruction: chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents, as well as cyber attacks.
"I tried to shape the overall approach in the course to determining where you can do quantitative analysis—where does it make sense?" Palmore says. "Quanti-tative analysis is not only collecting data and running statistical analyses. It has to do with stripping things into parts. It's about phrasing problems or phrasing analyses in such a way that they can easily be communicated in social sciences."
That approach can be used to plan preventive defenses against everything from the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile by a rogue nation to a cyber-terrorist attack on the Internet.
While Palmore's students may not have anticipated the modus operandi of the terrorists who launched the September 11 attacks, they did explore the likelihood of terrorist assaults at home and abroad. And they considered various types of threats as well as delivery methods.
Palmore also has co-taught a seminar, "Protecting Populations and Critical Infrastructure against Terrorist Attack."
Last August, Palmore and co-author Francois Melese published a paper in the journal Defense Analysis, in which they used a mathematical model known as game theory to determine whether deployment of a proposed National Missile Defense system against an ICBM attack makes sense.
In one scenario described in the paper, Palmore and Melese consider the outcome of two-player games in which one player is the United States. The objective is "to drive the adversary to use weapons other than ballistic missiles without the U.S. deploying a national missile defense." Sadly, Palmore says, the September 11 attacks demonstrated the reality of some of their conclusions.
"If we build a defense which everybody, including ourselves, believed to be 100 percent effective against any single or small number of ICBMs launched with any warheads," Palmore says, "then obviously one group is not going to spend money trying to launch an ICBM. They're going to do one of many other things."
By Melissa Mitchell, A.B. '80,
English
Fall 2001