Fred Adler will present "Can ants do calculus? And if not, can they fake it?"

Animals can be thought of as using sophisticated analogue computers to solve complex optimization problems. For example, colonies of ants must decide where workers should look for food. Sending too many to one place might be a waste of effort, while sending them over the entire desert might be a waste of time. Solving this problem requires thinking about the difference between what is good for an individual ant and what is good for the colony, which corresponds, somewhat surprisingly, to the difference between secant and tangent lines in calculus.

In solving this problem, real ants have two major drawbacks. First, they have only limited means to communicate information to each other. Second, they are stupid. I will show that ants can do precalculus and find a pretty good solution to the problem, and then extend this idea to how they can fake their way through calculus and find an even better solution.