Where's George? - Use in Research

Use in Research

Although Where's George? does not officially recognize the bills that travel the farthest or fastest, some have approached it as a semi-serious way to track patterns in the flow of the American currency.

Money flow displayed through Where's George was used in a 2006 research paper published by theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann and his coworkers. The paper described statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical model of the spread of infectious disease resulting from such travel. The article is in the January 26, 2006 issue of the journal Nature. Researchers found that 57% of the nearly half a million dollar bills studied traveled between 30 miles and 500 miles over approximately nine months in the United States. There is a short clip of a Brockmann's presentation on the subject from the IdeaFestival on YouTube. More recently, "Where's George?" data have been used to attempt to predict the rapidity and pattern of projected spread of the 2009 swine flu outbreak.