Colin Adams Shows How Calculus Can Save You from a Zombie Apocalypse

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., August 7, 2014— Williams College math professor Colin Adams, who is also a humor columnist for the Mathematical Intelligencer, has penned a novel about a zombie apocalypse at a liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, with calculus as the ultimate survival tool. Zombies and Calculus (which will be pre-released in September by Princeton Press) is a fast-paced action-adventure tale that incorporates topics such as logistic growth, gravitational acceleration, predator-prey models, pursuit problems, and the physics of combat.

The book includes appendices that explain the mathematics in the story, which follows math professor Craig Williams and a handful of students, staff, and faculty who band together and use calculus to defeat the hordes of zombie attackers. They avoid being eaten by taking advantage of the fact that zombies always point their tangent vector toward their target, for instance, and they use exponential growth to determine the rate at which the zombie virus is spreading.

“I love to think about interesting ways to get people to listen to mathematics long enough for them to see the beauty of the ideas,” says Adams, the Thomas T. Read Professor of Mathematics at Williams. Adams, who studies knot theory, is the author of The Knot Book, an elementary introduction to the theory, and Why Knot?, a mathematical comic book. In addition to his humor column, he has published a compendium of humorous math stories called Riot at the Calc Exam and Other Mathematically Bent Stories, and he co-authored How to Ace Calculus: The Streetwise Guide. Adams appeared with department colleague Thomas Garrity in a series of humorous debates on mathematical topics (“The Great Pi/e Debate” and others).

Adams has published a variety of research articles on knot theory and hyperbolic 3-manifolds, and authored the textbook Introduction to Topology: Pure and Applied. A member of the Williams faculty since 1985, he holds a B.S. from MIT and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1998 he was honored with the Haimo National Distinguished Teaching Award from the Mathematical Association of America, and in 2003 he received the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers.

Watch a short PBS video featuring Colin Adams at http://video.pbs.org/video/2365329674/

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Founded in 1793, Williams College is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts. The college’s 2,000 students are taught by a faculty noted for the quality of their teaching and research, and the achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in their research. Students’ educational experience is enriched by the residential campus environment in Williamstown, Mass., which provides a host of opportunities for interaction with one another and with faculty beyond the classroom. Admission decisions on U.S. applicants are made regardless of a student’s financial ability, and the college provides grants and other assistance to meet the demonstrated needs of all who are admitted.

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Published August 7, 2014