Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Ian Tregillis and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin have published a physics paper deriving a mathematical model for the Wild Cards virus, a fictional pathogen that kills 90% of those infected while granting survivors either mutations ("Jokers") or superpowers ("Aces").

Published in the American Journal of Physics (February 2025), their paper develops a Lagrangian formulation to explain how the virus maintains its consistent "90:9:1" statistical distribution. The model accounts for both observable cases and hypothetical "crypto" carriers with undetectable effects.

The authors propose treating viral outcomes as a dynamical system, using concepts from ergodic theory and classical mechanics. The resulting model combines Lagrangian mechanics, functional analysis, and probability theory to distill the complex viral behavior into a single mathematical expression.

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