Personification of history:  Historia

    Caption: Historia (1892) illustrating the personification of history.

    The tough lady in white must be Historia and the little monk, her personal assistant.

    Historia is probably much the same as Clio, the muse of history.

    There is valiant attempt to develop a mathematically predictive science of history: cliodynamics---the name is derived from Clio, the aforementioned muse of history.

    It's sort of like Isaac Asimov's (1920--1992) fictional psychohistory---but without a trying-to-rule-the-Milky-Way aspect.

    The essential technique of cliodynamics is modeling. You create a mathematical model of a historical system including dynamics (i.e., processes that cause change in the system quantities) and see how the model evolves and compare the evolving model to historical data.

    Very simple modeling can be done with differential equations which together with initial conditions are solved for analytical solutions or numerical soltuions (see, e.g., Historical Dynamics, Peter Turchin, 2003). Such differential-equation modeling can approximate reality to some degree and can often gives a lot of insight.

    A more advanced modeling approach is to use computer simulations of historical systems with historical agents (representing, e.g., persons or groups of persons of all kinds) who have rules of interaction. The rules of interaction and the environment of the historical agents can be made very complex. You evolve the model and compare to historical data.

      Fascinating. --- Spock

    Credit/Permission: Nikolaos Gyzis (1842--1901), 1892 / Public domain.
    Image link: Wikipedia: File:Nikolaos Gyzis - Historia.jpg.
    Local file: local link: historia.html.
    File: Clio file: historia.html.