Zombies and Calculus

Starred review from August 4, 2014
Romance! Danger! Calculus! Zombies! Adams (How to Ace Calculus), professor of mathematics at Williams College and humor columnist for The Mathematical Intelligencer, takes readers on an apocalyptic and educational adventure that’s also a Spielbergian sci-fi thriller. Craig Williams, math professor at a small, liberal arts college in bucolic western Massachusetts, learns of the zombie apocalypse when his star student succumbs to zombie bites in the middle of class. Williams and a handful of hardy souls band together to escape. Baseball bats and golf clubs are handy for beating down zombie attackers, but the key to survival turns out to be... calculus. In the best classic hard sci-fi style, Adams mixes action with valuable math concepts—from determining the best routes for evading zombies to working out how fast the virus could spread. The book is best for readers already somewhat familiar with calculus. Adams keeps the in-story math both appropriate and accessible, saving in-depth discussion for appendices at the end. Calculus fans looking for “real-world” applications woven into a nail-biter of a story, chock-full of narrow escapes, betrayals, some plucky kids, the family dog, and even a romantic subplot, will delight in this fun, and funny pop-math book.

September 1, 2014

Zombies and calculus--seriously? Well, yes and no; the tongue-in-cheek title by Adams (Thomas T. Read Professor of Mathematics, Williams Coll.; The Knot Book) is designed to lure the unwary into learning some mathematics. In this short adventure novel, a small band of students and faculty, led by an intrepid math professor, tries to survive a face-to-face encounter with the walking dead. Despite the imminent danger of being eaten alive or turned into a zombie himself, the professor finds time to expatiate upon some applications of the calculus. As the number of zombies seems to be increasing rapidly, he explains exponential and logistic growth. Fleeing the attackers provides a discussion of classic pursuit problems and predator-prey systems of differential equations. The fear of infection leads him to derive the equations that govern the incubation period from the time of infection to onset of symptoms. To keep the story flowing, some of the mathematical details are reserved for the appendixes. VERDICT This book can be seen as either a quick read for those well versed in the calculus, a clever supplement to a standard calculus course, or an inducement for some to further their mathematical education. It's fun but not a priority acquisition for most libraries.--Harold D. Shane, Mathematics Emeritus, Baruch Coll. Lib., CUNY

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