Stephen Ornes

For Alex Alemi and Matt Bierbaum, physics graduate students at Cornell University in the US, there really was no escaping the zombies – those fictional reanimated human corpses that feast on the living.

In autumn 2011 they were required to complete a project for a class on statistical mechanics taught at Cornell by James Sethna – a physicist who claims he’s “constantly dragged into new topics by my students”. Alemi had recently been reading World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide, two popular and detailed books on zombies by US horror author Max Brooks. (World War Z uses a collection of individual narratives, in the style of oral history, to depict the harrowing spread of a zombie plague.) Brooks’ books attribute the resurrection of dead humans to a vicious virus, and Sethna had mentioned disease modelling as a possible topic for his students to study. Merging the two ideas “seemed natural”, Alemi recalls. “We thought we might as well study zombies.”