IN: Sangakkara was born to Kumari Surangana and Swarnakumara Sangakkara, an attorney-at-law at Matale, Sri Lanka in 1977. His parents settled in Kandy, where he spent his childhood. Sangakkara received his primary and secondary education at Trinity College, Kandy, an independent elite private boys' school situated in the central highlands of Sri Lanka. He has two sisters: Thushari and Saranga, and an elder brother: Vemindra, all who have made national-level achievements during their schooling.

In February 2009, the then captain of the Sri Lankan side, Mahela Jayawardene announced that he would step down from captaincy "in the best interests of the Sri Lankan team". He said he believed that it would give his successor around two years to build up to the 2011 Cricket World Cup. Therefore, at the age of 31 and with the experience of 80 Tests and 246 ODIs, Sangakkara succeeded Jayawardene as Sri Lanka's captain in all formats of the game. His first engagement in the role was the 2009 ICC World Twenty20 hosted by England in June. Sri Lanka became runners-up in the series after winning all the game in group and knock-out stages and being defeated by Pakistan in the final. Sangakkara made 64 not-out in the final, but was unable to take Sri Lanka for the championship. Sri Lanka failed to reach to the knock-out stage of the ICC Champions Trophy in September 2009. The next Indian tour proved to be disastrous for the team, with Sri Lanka being beaten by India in Test series 2-0 and ODI series 3-1. Sri Lankan team under the captaincy of Sangakkara gained momentum and won the next Tri-series in Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka, beating India as well. The Sri Lankans' tour of Australia proved to be very successful, in winning both the T20 and ODI series. This was Sri Lanka's first ever series victory in Australia. A month in advance of the 2011 World Cup in March, Sangakkara decided that he would resign the captaincy after the tournament. Sri Lanka reached the final of the tournament. Throughout the tournament Sangakkara was in prolific form with the bat scoring 465 runs from 9 matches and was the third highest run-scorer behind teammate Tillakaratne Dilshan and India's Sachin Tendulkar. Days after guiding Sri Lanka to the finals of the World Cup, Sangakkara announced to the public he was stepping down as captain of the T20 and ODI teams. He offered to continue as Test captain if deemed necessary for transition to new skipper, but Dilshan was appointed captain across all formats. Reflecting on the decision afterwards, he said that "captaining Sri Lanka is a job that ages you very quickly ... It's rarely a job you will last long in ... I also had a two-year stint, and I enjoyed it at times, certainly on the field where our results showed we were one of the top two sides in the world for one-and-a-half years, especially in the shorter form of the game." The same year, he was named the ODI Cricketer of the Year at the ICC awards ceremony. In 2012, he was honored as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year.

What lead up to Jayawardene stepping down from captaincy?

OUT: ". He said he believed that it would give his successor around two years to build up to the 2011 Cricket World Cup.

IN: Lewis Fry Richardson was the youngest of seven children born to Catherine Fry (1838-1919) and David Richardson (1835-1913). They were a prosperous Quaker family, David Richardson operating a successful tanning and leather manufacturing business. At age 12 he was sent to a Quaker boarding school, Bootham School in York, where he received an education in science, which stimulated an active interest in natural history. In 1898 he went on to Durham College of Science (a college of Durham University) where he took courses in mathematical physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology.

Richardson also applied his mathematical skills in the service of his pacifist principles, in particular in understanding the basis of international conflict. For this reason, he is now considered the initiator, or co-initiator (with Quincy Wright and Pitirim Sorokin as well as others such as Kenneth Boulding, Anatol Rapaport and Adam Curle), of the scientific analysis of conflict--an interdisciplinary topic of quantitative and mathematical social science dedicated to systematic investigation of the causes of war and conditions of peace. As he had done with weather, he analysed war using mainly differential equations and probability theory. Considering the armament of two nations, Richardson posited an idealised system of equations whereby the rate of a nation's armament build-up is directly proportional to the amount of arms its rival has and also to the grievances felt toward the rival, and negatively proportional to the amount of arms it already has itself. Solution of this system of equations allows insightful conclusions to be made regarding the nature, and the stability or instability, of various hypothetical conditions which might obtain between nations. He also originated the theory that the propensity for war between two nations was a function of the length of their common border. And in Arms and Insecurity (1949), and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960), he sought to analyse the causes of war statistically. Factors he assessed included economics, language, and religion. In the preface of the latter, he wrote: "There is in the world a great deal of brilliant, witty political discussion which leads to no settled convictions. My aim has been different: namely to examine a few notions by quantitative techniques in the hope of reaching a reliable answer." In Statistics of Deadly Quarrels Richardson presented data on virtually every war from 1815 to 1945. As a result, he hypothesized a base 10 logarithmic scale for conflicts. In other words, there are many more small fights, in which only a few people die, than large ones that kill many. While no conflict's size can be predicted beforehand--indeed, it is impossible to give an upper limit to the series--overall they do form a Poisson distribution. On a smaller scale he showed the same pattern for gang murders in Chicago and Shanghai. Others have noted that similar statistical patterns occur frequently, whether planned (lotteries, with many more small payoffs than large wins), or by natural organisation (there are more small towns with grocery stores than big cities with superstores).

Why did Lewis research this

OUT:
My aim has been different: namely to examine a few notions by quantitative techniques in the hope of reaching a reliable answer."