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Adam Kucharski, mathematician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Photo: Tom Jamieson for The New York Times |
In an eerie coincidence, he wrote a book called “The Rules of Contagion,”
before the current outbreak, which has been published in Britain and
will be released in September in the United States. In it he talks about
the math of contagion involving not only physical diseases, but also
ideas, rumors and even financial crises.
In
a recent experiment for the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu, he
worked with another mathematician and BBC presenter, Hannah Fry, of
University College London, and collaborators at the University of
Cambridge, to create a documentary, “Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic,”
using a phone app to track social contacts and map how an infection
might spread...
The news of coronavirus epidemics around the world involves a flood of
numbers that are a challenge for any nonscientist to digest. I asked Dr.
Kucharski to help us navigate some of these numbers, and to tell us
which ones we should pay attention to. We talked on the phone and
corresponded by email this week. This is an edited version of our back
and forth.
Source: The New York Times 
