A surprisingly large number of academic studies—as in, more than one—have applied mathematical modeling to the concept of human-vampire co-existence. Using the depiction of bloodsuckers in various forms of media, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to True Blood, these papers look at whether Earth’s vampire population would inevitably annihilate humanity, and, if so, how long it would take.
Mathematically influenced scholarship of vampire-human relations took off in the early ’80s courtesy of Richard Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann, Austrian mathematicians with a mutual penchant for the undead. In 1982, their paper, titled “The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable Resources” was published in the operations research journal RAIRO. In it, Hartl and Mehlmann posited “optimal bloodsucking strategies for dynamic continuous vampires.”
via Atlas Obscura
Image: Detail from The Vampire by Philip Burne-Jones. (Image: Wikipedia/Public domain)
