

Dr. Steven Le Comber of Queen Mary, a biologist at the college of the University of London, has applied a mathematical analysis that is commonly used to in criminology to track criminals’ identity and now the mysterious street artist Banksy. Find out the alleged name of the man behind the enigmatic figure, Bansky, below.

Dr. Le Comber paired up with Kim Rossmo, criminologist at Texas State University, to use the mathematical mode, called the Dirichlet process, and his knowledge of criminal profiling to pin down the elusive artist. This mathematical system uses key locations, and the concept of geographical backtracking to locate mutual factors at a specific hotspots with an accurate probability summing model that is precise in locating the subject - within a range of 50 meters in certain cases. This model also has been successfully used to predict the spread of disease, such as a malaria outbreak.

They identified Banksy as Robin Gunningham (who was allegedly called out as Banksy in 2008) independently through their research by collecting 140 of his assumed artworks in London and Bristol, and extrapolating the timeline of when the art was created and correlated the results to a mutual person within the vicinity of all of these locations - Mr. Gunningham. The Independent says:

“The researchers said they wanted to demonstrate the broader potential of geographic profiling, a sophisticated form of statistical analysis used in criminology to try and narrow down possible locations where a repeat offender might be living.



The “hot spot” peaks correlated to a pub, playing fields, a residential address in Bristol and three addresses in London. Using publicly available information, the researchers concluded that those locations were all places lived in or frequented by Gunningham.”



h/t: The Economist

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(Source: culturenlifestyle.com)

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