Friday, December 5, 2014

Zombies & Calculus by Colin Adams

I saw Zombies & Calculus by Colin Adams in the Princeton University Press catalog and it caught my eye (for obvious reasons). I have no idea how it reads but the premise is so unique that I had to share it. If you're teaching Calculus, it seems like this might be worth taking a look at and then sharing with your students.

Adams is the humor columnist for the Mathematical Intelligencer and a professor of mathematics at Williams College.  

From the catalog copy:

Zombies & 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.

I had a brutal time in calculus and anything I could have done to make sense of it all would have been welcome. Zombies? Might as well!

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