Changepoint Analysis of Historical Battle Deaths (arXiv:1909.02626 [stat.AP], in the June 2020 edition of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series A) introduces an algorithm built from the latest techniques for finding changes in time series of heavy-tailed data and uses it to find the moments at which the historical pattern of war deaths changed significantly.
Bootstrapping the Battle of Britain introduces weighted bootstrapping, the statistical technique of weighted resampling with replacement, as a tool for exploring alternative histories, and is in the January 2020 edition of theJournal of Military History. Niall MacKay and Jamie Wood talked about this and counterfactual history more generally on Dan Snow's History Hit.
Dr Ian Horwood
is a historian at York St John University. His principal interests are in US military history, airpower history, and the wars in Indochina.
Professor Niall MacKay
is a mathematician and theoretical physicist at the University of York. He has interests in military history, operations research and combat modelling.
Dr Christopher Price
is a historian at York St John University. His main areas of interest are financial, economic and military history in the twentieth century, especially the inter-war period.
Professor A Jamie Wood
is a mathematician and systems biologist at the University of York. He specializes in the simulation and analysis of complex systems, and has interests across a range of modern international history and the analysis of warfare.
We offer PhD projects across our full range of interests, for historians and mathematicians. The only additional qualification needed is sympathy with the other discipline and an interest in the techniques it can bring to the project. If you're interested, get in touch!