When someone mentions zombies, the first thing you might think of is a bloody horror film filled with the undead walking around terrorizing the living. However, when Professor Robert Smith? (the ? is not a typo - Smith? legally changed his last name in an effort to distinguish himself from the countless other Robert Smiths of the world) talks about zombies, he does it from a scientific viewpoint. Smith? is the author of the scientific paper "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection," which will soon be published in the book "Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress."
While this sounds like an incredibly geeky joke, the math behind this paper is sound. In zombie lore, zombies infect other people with a zombie virus through biting them. Thus, zombies can be used to illustrate a rapidly spreading, highly infectious and lethal infection. Though the use of zombies lightens the tone of the paper, the concept behind zombie infections is no different from other diseases that spread throughout human populations.
Smith? came up with the idea of modeling the spread of infectious diseases through zombies through his students. He is an assistant professor specializing in disease modeling at the University of Ottawa. During one class, he asked his students to model an infectious disease. The students asked him if a zombie outbreak would be acceptable, and thus the idea for this scientific paper was born.
The paper discusses several ways to deal with a zombie outbreak. For instance, zombies can be quarantined and thus prevented from spreading the virus, or perhaps a cure for zombies may be found. However, the paper concludes that the best way to deal with an outbreak would be to kill the zombies before they can cause any further harm. Although this paper ventures into flights of fancy with zombies, these solutions are no different from real life ways to deal with diseases. Zombies just make this paper a far more interesting read.
