For those who claim that math has no practical application in everyday life, our response has always been “oh yeah…well, what about an uprising of the undead?” Of course, that response was, unfortunately, a blustery theoretical, unsupported by actual computations and graphs and PowerPoint presentations, and therefore lacked credibility. But all that has changed, thanks to some Canadian college students who have wisely invested their parents’ tuition payments in the creation of a mathematical model of how an “outbreak of zombie infection” might spread throughout the general non-Night-of-the-Living-Dead population. You can read their full report here (PDF document).
If you find reading about mathematical models somewhat, um, boring, here’s an abstract that will allow you to be impressively conversant about the study without actually knowing anything. (In other words, you’re qualified to blog about it.)
As the guy on the travel website TV ad puts it, this is serious stuff we’re doing here. And if you don’t think so, just skim through a few of the comments left on the Freakonomics blog post that originally highlighted the Canadian study. I for one am glad that we have people who are committed to addressing such pressing issues. And I suspect that you’ll never again look at mathematical models in quite the same light.
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The world clearly needs more math majors. But thinking back, I think most of my math professors were actually zombies.
Eric, my father was a native Michigander, just across the border from Canada … I suspect one of the drawbacks of leaving home and joining the Marines was that he’d posted somewhere ill-prepared for an “outbreak of zombie infection” … Korea, Vietnam, Beirut, etc.
Heh. I’m sure that’s what my teachers thought about the students gazing back at them, with dead eyes and drooling mouths.
Of course, in some of those countries, the zombies would at least be a bit shorter, on average.