Diseases and Money

Ah, maths. Is there any thing it can't do? Well, except pull hot women, of course. When deciding upon my PhD topic I considered studying mathematical models of disease propagation. Since disease propagation has both probabilistic and network aspects, modelling it is both an interesting and challenging task. Hence, a couple of researchers have decided to study something very similar to diseases, namely:

Money, like diseases, is carried by people around the world, so what better way to plot the spread of a potential influenza pandemic than to track the circulation of dollar bills, researchers reason.

Researchers in Germany and the United States did just that to develop a mathematical model of human travel that can be used to plot the spread of future pandemics.

"There are some universal rules governing human travel and they can be used to develop a new class of model for the spread of infectious disease," said Dr Dirk Brockmann, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation.

In addition to giving insights into how an infectious disease would spread, mathematical models and computer simulations could help to develop measures to take against it, he added.

This is partly the reason why a lot of mathematicians work in the medical industry (the main reason is they need experts in statistics to see how effective various medicines and medical procedures are). Perhaps there's hope for me landing a job yet...