The Math Club
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Texas Tech University
While old infectious diseases reappear periodically despite much humanitarian efforts to prevent its reemergence, they can also suddenly appear in new locations, e.g.,
cholera in Haiti where this disease was absent for centuries. On the other hand, new types of infectious diseases (e.g., coronavirus as we speak) give public major concerns.
In mathematical biology, researchers can model the spread of such infectious diseases, analyze rigorously to justify its derivation and apply it to the real world to predict
the severity of an outbreak. This talk will be intended to be accessible to any undergraduate students with a basic background in calculus (preferably differential equations).It's safe to say that video games are more popular today than they've ever been before. Likewise, thanks to constantly improving technology making a video game is arguably easier than it's ever been before. These two factors combined mean that the video game market is booming, and almost anyone - from the biggest publisher to a lone guy coding from his parents' basement - can throw their hat in the ring now. Making a game is easy - any idiot can cobble together some Unity store assets and sell it - but making a good game requires more than just coding ability. It requires creativity, effort, and a surprising amount of math. The gameplay is just as important, if not more so, than the story or graphics – and a few badly thought out numbers can throw off the balance of even the most intricate and otherwise fun games. So, in order to help my own games avoid such pitfalls, I’ve been researching the many games that came before to find out what worked and what did not, and where the math behind them led to both elegant, engaging gameplay and frustratingly broken experiences, sometimes within the same game.