You Can Run, You Can Hide: The Epidemiology and Statistical Mechanics of Zombies

TL;DR

This paper uses a fictional zombie outbreak to illustrate epidemiological modeling and critical phenomena, including analytical solutions and large-scale simulations of disease spread across the US.

Contribution

It introduces novel zombie models to demonstrate epidemiological and statistical mechanics techniques, including an exact solution and a percolation analysis of spatial spread.

Findings

Analytical expression for the fully connected zombie model.

Zombie spread on a lattice falls within the percolation universality class.

Quantitative analysis of US outbreak susceptibility.

Abstract

We use a popular fictional disease, zombies, in order to introduce techniques used in modern epidemiology modelling, and ideas and techniques used in the numerical study of critical phenomena. We consider variants of zombie models, from fully connected continuous time dynamics to a full scale exact stochastic dynamic simulation of a zombie outbreak on the continental United States. Along the way, we offer a closed form analytical expression for the fully connected differential equation, and demonstrate that the single person per site two dimensional square lattice version of zombies lies in the percolation universality class. We end with a quantitative study of the full scale US outbreak, including the average susceptibility of different geographical regions.