Yet another mathematician who uses a silly premise to get Halloween headlines. This one’s kind of a flop, though. Costas Efthimiou claims that the population growth rate of vampires makes them fundamentally impossible. His reasoning is that, starting in 1600 from a population of 538 million, if each vampire converts one person into a vampire once a month, it will be only 2.6 years until all humans have been converted.

Now, this is a bit like saying that if a grasshopper eats a pound of grass a minute, given 1 billion grasshoppers and 500 million pounds of grass, then the Earth will be barren in about 30 seconds. Sure, the math works just fine, but the data is obviously wrong. Dracula was hundreds of years old (potentially thousands; the book doesn’t actually say,) and had created half a dozen childer. Lestat is 300 years old, and has only created two. Unfortunately I don’t wear enough white makeup and black hair dye to name any other vampires, but their birth rate is on the order of either decades or centuries, not single months.

So, fear not, Vlad: no matter what biology, history, zoology, archaeology or common sense may say about you, math hasn’t disproven a thing.