Zombies. They’re everywhere. My dentist and his assistant spent my last visit and chatting about The Walking Dead while drilling into my head, and it seems like every reasonably large town hosts a zombie run. Science education is getting in on the trend, too. Colleges have classes about zombies, AMC (the network that broadcasts The Walking Dead) is sponsoring a free zombie-themed survival course, and Texas Instruments developed an app for teaching neuroscience using ideas from zombie movies. Even the CDC wants to help you prepare for the zombie apocalypse. Frankly, it’s a little out of hand. How long will this zombie fever last?
Sarah Reehl, who is now a mathematics graduate student at Utah State University, noticed the ubiquity of zombies while she was working on her undergraduate thesis at Carroll College in Montana last year. “I was watching The Walking Dead and trying to make physiologically correct arguments about zombie mechanics. My instincts were to model a real zombie infection,” she wrote in an email. But in her search for data about zombie behavior, she decided that zombies were more interesting as a pop culture phenomenon and shifted her focus. In her thesis (pdf), Reehl used a standard epidemiological model to study not only seasonal influenza rates but also our culture’s obsession with zombies.
Read the full post at Roots of Unity.
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