Zombies and Calculus
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
