About:

This Public Talk was co-organised by the Edinburgh Mathematical Society for Maths Week Scotland.

In this lecture, Kit Yates looked at some of the basic models and mathematics underlying the understanding of disease spread, and picked apart the meanings behind some of the terms we hear about in the news: from exponential growth and R to critical immunisation threshold and herd immunity.

About the speaker:

Kit Yates (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath. Alongside his academic position, Kit is also an author and science communicator. His first book, The Maths of Life and Death, is about the places where maths can have an impact on our everyday lives without us even realising it.

His research demonstrates that mathematics can be used to describe all sorts of real-world phenomena: from embryo formation to locust swarming and from sleeping sickness to egg-shell patterning. He is particularly interested in the role that randomness plays in Biology. His research into Mathematical Biology has been covered by the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, RTE, Scientific American and Reuters amongst others.