This year, the mathematician George Mohler showed that what holds for earthquakes also holds true for crime: not only does an initial crime beget future offenses, but these "aftercrimes" also tend to occur according to a predictable distribution in time and space.

We have all heard of aftershocks, the tremors that follow a big earthquake, but what about aftercrimes?

George Mohler, a mathematician at Santa Clara University, in California, thinks something similar is true of crimes. There is often a pattern of "aftercrimes" in the wake of an initial one. The similarity with earthquakes intrigued him and he wondered if the mathematical formulas that seismologists employ to predict aftershocks were applicable to aftercrimes, too.