Please join us for the Undergraduate Math Seminar, which meets at its usual time and place this week- Wednesday, 5:30-6:30 in LGRT 1634. Elizabeth Drellich will deliver a Halloween themed talk entitled “The Zombies are Generating!” (abstract below). As always, pizza and soda
will be provided.
See you there!
Abstract:
If on Halloween there is one zombie, who infects 3 people on Nov.1,
and then each zombie infects 3 new people a day, every day, we will
see that it is straight forward to calculate that there will be 4^n
zombies walking around on the nth day after Halloween. That is a lot
of zombies. But what if the zombie virus only allowed a newly created
zombie to lurch around for 2 days? Or what if each zombie infects 3
people its first day, but only one its second day before it decomposes
and is unable to hunt for more brains? We will learn about generating
functions as a way to determine how many zombies are out to get us.
Some parts of this talk will assume that you have seen sequences and
series, but it is aimed at anyone who prefers eating pizza to human
brains.