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When a zombie virus outbreak hits a small New England liberal arts college, math professor Craig Williams and a small band of survivors use calculus to help them live through the fall of civilization, with appendixes explaining the math needed to enjoy the book.
Summary
A novel that uses calculus to help you survive a zombie apocalypse
How can calculus help you survive the zombie apocalypse? Colin Adams, humor columnist for the Mathematical Intelligencer and one of today's most outlandish and entertaining popular math writers, demonstrates how in this zombie adventure novel.
Zombies and Calculus is the account of Craig Williams, a math professor at a small liberal arts college in New England, who, in the middle of a calculus class, finds himself suddenly confronted by a late-arriving student whose hunger is not for knowledge. As the zombie virus spreads and civilization crumbles, Williams uses calculus to help his small band of survivors defeat the hordes of the undead. Along the way, readers learn how to avoid being eaten by taking advantage of the fact that zombies always point their tangent vector toward their target, and how to use exponential growth to determine the rate at which the virus is spreading. Williams also covers topics such as logistic growth, gravitational acceleration, predator-prey models, pursuit problems, the physics of combat, and more. With the aid of his story, you too can survive the zombie onslaught.
Featuring easy-to-use appendixes that explain the book's mathematics in greater detail, Zombies and Calculus is suitable both for those who have only recently gotten the calculus bug, as well as for those whose disease has advanced to the multivariable stage.
Report
"Before Zombies and Calculus, math was quick to kill my appetite. In fact, math damn near killed me altogether throughout most of college (it is of course a cliché to say that as a math student I was pretty much a zombie). If I had only had this book then . . . at least now I can stomach derivatives as well as a zombie outbreak. That's no small accomplishment! Read Zombies and Calculus--you'll laugh . . . you'll cry . . . you'll multiply."--Steven C. Schlozman, M.D., author of The Zombie Autopsies
