All posts tagged: Peter Turchin

Sun appearing over the India Ocean Credit: Nasa/Flickr

Mathematics professor predicts chaos in the next decade — a sign of the times?

Peter Turchin is a mathematics professor at the University of Connecticut. One of his projects is using mathematics to determine what lies ahead for the world’s future. And if he is right, it does not look good. Based on his mathematical model, Turchin is predicting a time of economic and political chaos in the the next decade – 2020s. For his predictions, Turchin used a branch of mathematics he developed called cliodynamics. According to Wikipedia, this looks upon history as just another branch of science and describes it as “the mathematical modeling of historical processes.” Basically, Turchin developed a mathematical algorithm to analyze past historical events and then used it to predict future events. Apparently, the model successfully predicted the political instability that the world is going through at the moment, but his calculations show that it won’t peak until the next decade, around 2025, and could result in the collapse of society. It will be caused by a number of events including the declining wealth of people and families that will put them under …