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I want to tell you a story about a mathematician you’ve probably never heard of, but whose work has helped shape a lot of what we’re taking about today... 1/
While researching my book, I learnt more about Hilda Hudson, who published her first research when she was aged 10 - in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/045189a0 2/
She then studied maths at Cambridge where she got first class marks in 1903. At the time, women weren't allowed to get degrees, so - despite matching the male student who came 7th in the year - her performance wasn’t included in the official listing. 3/
In 1916, Hudson worked on a pair of papers with Ronald Ross. These outlined mathematical models for 'laws of happenings' - an early attempt at establishing a theory of epidemic dynamics ( https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1917.0015) 4/
The work would later inspire Kermack and McKendrick to outline their landmark susceptible-infectious-recovered model in 1927 ( https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1927.0118) 5/
In turn, the research that followed would eventually give rise to the field infectious disease modelling. And the mathematical thresholds in those early models would evolve into a simpler metric for contagion - the reproduction number. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2014.0307 6/
Yet because of the First World War, Hudson didn't publish any more work on epidemiology after those two papers. In 1917, she joined the Air Ministry to work on aircaft design - work for which she later got an OBE. 7/
Perhaps most remarkably, epidemiology and aeronautical engineering were effectively side projects - her main academic research was focused on pure maths, notably geometry: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=3117444465504600016&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5 8/8
