America seems to have the most serial killers, although Russia produced Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper," in the 1980s. Mathematicians discovered that his murders followed the same mathematical pattern as earthquakes, avalanches
America seems to have the most serial killers, although Russia produced Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper," in the 1980s. Mathematicians discovered that his murders followed the same mathematical pattern as earthquakes, avalanches and stock market crashes. Could serial killers be motivated by math?
Engineers Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury noticed that alhough Chikatilo sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he went just three days. They found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical formula known as a power law.
In LiveScience.com, Natalie Wolchover writes, "When the number of days between Chikatilo's murders is plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days