The variance in secondary infections can be large and can lead to superspreading events. Some of today’s most prolific infectious disease modelers originally trained as physicists, including Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, an adviser to the UK government on its COVID-19 response, and Vittoria Colizza of Sorbonne University in Paris, a leader in network modeling of disease spread. in 1760, and Nobel Prize–winning physician Ronald Ross created mathematical models to encourage the use of mosquito control to reduce malaria transmission. Bacaër, in A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics, Springer (2011), p. Daniel Bernoulli of fluid-mechanics fame devised a model to predict the benefit of smallpox inoculations 2 2.
In fact, the idea of using mathematics to understand infectious disease spread is older than germ theory itself. Ideas and people constantly flow between physics and those fields. Day, A Biologist’s Guide to Mathematical Modeling in Ecology and Evolution, Princeton U. Physics is often considered the most mathematical science, but theory and rigorous mathematical analysis also underlie ecology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology.
