One Thousand and One Conjectures

Greenland's ice sheet and Roman monetary history are usually studied by different disciplines, yet the first quietly records the second: lead deposition in Greenland ice cores derives largely from the atmospheric fallout of Roman smelting, and because silver was refined from lead-rich…

Milton Friedman's plucking model of business cycles holds that an economy runs along a capacity ceiling from which recessions pluck output downward: deep slumps rebound fast, while booms say nothing about the next bust. This conjecture transposes that asymmetry onto documentary papyrology's…

In financial crises, liquidity flees risky assets and concentrates into a handful of safe ones — the flight to quality. This conjecture maps that dynamic onto papyrological geography: when aggregate documentary output contracts, surviving documentation should concentrate into fewer, safer places, because…

Taylor's law — fluctuation scaling from statistical physics and ecology — says that across populations, variance grows as a power of the mean: exponent 1 for independent Poisson noise, 2 for perfectly synchronized fluctuation. This conjecture applies it to the geography of…

Price-ceiling economics predicts that goods capped below market price withdraw from legal, recorded exchange, while goods capped at or above market trade on visibly. This conjecture reads Diocletian's Price Edict of 301 CE through that lens: the Edict's famous failure should be…

Absenteeism econometrics has two robust modern findings: absence hazard spikes on workdays adjacent to rest days, as workers manufacture long weekends, and total absence is dominated by a small cadre of chronic absentees. This conjecture claims the pharaoh's own tomb-builders behaved identically…