Sun Tzu was a military strategist who lived in China about 2500 years ago. His book is still popular today, especially in business circles.

This talk presents a study of “The Art of War” from the perspectives of logic, mathematics, and computer science. We explain briefly what a mind map is and our strict text tree interpretation of it, for the purpose of analyzing Sun Tzu’s text. We show that you can improve the translation and find more meaning in the text, representing the text as mind maps. If time permits, we will illustrate that, surprisingly, the text still helps us to understand what is happening in warfare today.

The title of this talk is also the title of our book, co-authored by Kaibo Xie (Tsinghua Univ. Beijing), and Bonan Zhao (Univ. of Edinburgh), and published in 2022 by Springer. The book is the result of a joint study of the Institute of Language, Logic and Computation, Univ. of Amsterdam and the Institute for Philosophy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.