My favourite lecture ever, and what it says about fighting COVID-19
I'd like to tell you about my favourite lecture of my entire time as a student, on February 20, 1996. It is extraordinarily relevant in today's world, because it described models for epidemics. I remember because it came with a convincing case that much can be learned from this class of models by any student applying models to inform urgent decisions. It's a lecture that I've kept learning from for the last 24 years. The lecture was given by John Harte at Berkeley, and part of a class on environmental modelling co-taught with Zac Powell. Many may know John for his introductory Consider a Spherical Cow book, and a subset of the lectures eventually became the more advanced Cylindrical Cow book. I loved it because it felt like drinking math out of a firehose. Apparently, I was thirsty. And in terms of differential equations, these models are archetypal, the maths equivalent of the greatest novels. Let me first say, don't for a minute dismiss cows as irrelevant: Ne