Only aggressive attacks would save us from the zombies ( Photo: Christopher King)
While the World Health Organization has been in a recent panic over an impending H1N1 influenza outbreak, they may have missed the latest and greatest threat to the future of humanity: a zombie attack.
‘When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection’ is the brainchild and first published work of Carleton grad students Ioan Hudea and Philip Munz, who alongside University of Ottawa professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname) and student Joe Imad published the paper in early January 2009.
“[Hudea] and I were both kind of stuck in a rut with math and wanted to do something that was interesting to us, and not really thinking that it would be interesting to anybody else,” Munz said.
The paper uses complex mathematical equations to predict the outcome of a zombie epidemic, and determines that the only way to save humanity from a zombie apocalypse would be to attack the zombies as frequently and aggressively as possible.
“We were looking at the transmission of the disease from the infected zombie to humans, rates at which through some sort of interaction between humans and zombies one would come out on top,” Munz explained.
The paper has received international attention in light of concerns over an H1N1 influenza epidemic as people look for ways to combat a new, deadly and rapidly-spreading disease with which the medical establishment has no experience.
“It’s amazing, just unreal. We’re quite impressed,” said Hudea about the attention the paper has received.
“We weren’t really thinking that all this would start happening and people would start paralleling it with real diseases,” Munz said.
The team dug into popular culture to provide background information for the paper.
“There are two kinds of zombies,” said Hudea. “The fast ones like in 28 Days Later, and we didn’t look at those. We looked at the traditional zombie, the slow-moving ones from George Romero.”
Although they cite everything from video games like Resident Evil to Max Brooks’ A Zombie Survival Guide and the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead, Hudea and Munz stress that the emphasis was more on math than on zombie dynamics.
Munz said when he leads tutorials he tries “to make math as fun as possible for the suffering students.”
“Now that this has come out I definitely see it as a way of making this specific field of mathematics, mathematical biology, more interesting,” Munz said. “Kind of like what CSI did for forensic science.”