Deadly Mathematics

Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath and a popular science writer. Kit’s research has demonstrated, unexpectedly, that mathematics can be used to describe all sorts of 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. He is currently writing a book called “The Maths of Life and Death” to be released in the autumn of 2019. Come along and find out more about the important places maths crops up in the everyday world.

Last time you had a cold, who did you catch it from? And who did they catch it from? What if next time you catch something deadly? These are the kind of questions sneeze-prone mathematician Tim Rogers of the University of Bath worries about. He uses mathematics to try to understand and predict the behaviour of complex systems - everything from the evolution of altruism to the dynamics of social networks. In this terrifying talk, he will show how the mathematical theory of networks can be used to predict the spread of deadly diseases.