Washington: Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have
found that the seemingly erratic behaviour of serial killers
conforms to the same mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes,
avalanches, stock market crashes and many other sporadic events.
The study, conducted by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury,
electrical engineers from the University of California, Los
Angeles, modelled the behaviour of Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome
murderer who took the lives of 53 people in Rostov, Russia
between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo sometimes went nearly
three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he
went just three days. The researchers found that the seemingly
random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical
distribution known as a power law. When the number of days
between Chikatilo’s murders is plotted against the number of
times he waited that number of days, the relationship forms a
near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot,
Live Science reported. It’s the same resul