The title of this book, Math in the Time of Corona, has been drawn from the highly acclaimed novel by Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera. The volume editor, Alice Wonders, holds a fictitious name that represents the mathematics publishing group at Springer Nature. Undeterred by disasters, so many mathematical and scientific discoveries have been made during times of duress or confinement. Unlike most any other subject, mathematics may be researched from anywhere. Covid-19, like Cholera, implementation of vaccinations have been uneven throughout the globe since the beginning of 2021. However, there has been a renewed hope for a return to normalcy though the timing will no doubt vary worldwide. Essays in this volume vary in topic and are written by members of the greater mathematics community, hence the use of “Math” in the book title. They recount or describe significant or noteworthy discoveries, musings, award winnings, eureka moments, challenges, solutions, inspirations, etc. that have resulted from, or have occurred during, an unprecedented global pandemic. Several of the authors have been involved in starting new research and devising new methodologies related to society’s response to the outbreak and its ability to self-organize during a dramatic and complex situation. Some contributions describe how mathematical models and the management of big data have proved to be fundamental tools for the interpretation of epidemic activity and development of coping mechanisms.
Author(s): Alice Wonders
Series: Mathematics Online First Collections
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 464
City: Cham
Contents
Introduction
Things Lost and Won During the Plague
1 Blissfully Unaware in the Mountains
2 The Trip to Stockholm
3 Returning Home, into the Lockdown
Has the coronavirus affected the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize?
Intensive Collaborative Work on COVID-19 Modeling
1 Introduction
2 Under-Reporting of COVID-19
3 ICU and Non-ICU Admissions in the U.S.A.
4 Social Distancing
5 Virtual Tourism Technology and Information Geometry
6 Timely Assistance Provided in Planning and Response
7 Artificial Intelligence Frameworks
8 Rewards of Distance Collaboration in the Time of COVID-19
References
The Home-Field Paradox
1 Where Are Most of the Games Played?
2 Where Are Most of the Games Really Played?
3 So Which Team Has the Advantage?
4 What Had the Statistician Discovered?
Data Analysis and Predictive Mathematical Modeling for COVID-19 Epidemic Studies
1 Introduction
2 Mathematical Models
3 The COVID-19 Case
4 The Use of Apps
5 The Data Lake
References
A View from Lockdown: Mathematics Discovered, Invented, and Inherited
1 Your Best Friend, the Subconscious
2 Mathematics Inherited
3 Ernst Haeckel: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny
4 Inoculation Against Lockdown Blues
References
Exponentials and the Virus
The Consolation of Math in Plague Time
Singularities at Home, Unofficial Observations
1 Introduction
2 Remarkable Personalities
3 Episodes During Scientific Meetings
4 Other Remarks and Observations
References
An Essay in the Time of Corona
1 Is There?
2 Is This a Possible Start?
3 Plus ça Change, Plus c´est la mème Chose
4 There Is
References
Truth by Close Proximity
A Teacher and an Administrator in the Time of Corona
Ups and Downs
Off Line from No Line to On Line
1 No Line
2 Off Line
3 On Line
References
Dodging a Bullet
The Co-Video Mathematician
1 Teaching
2 My Children
3 School Committee
What you always wanted to know about exponential growth
Glass and Lace
Covid-19 Analytics: Proposed Projects for Undergraduate Research
1 Project 2: Practical significance of inflection point.
2 Project 3: Does Covid- 19 disproportionally affect the minorities and low-income areas of a city?
3 Project 4: What is (are) the best predictor(s) for the number of new cases or death in a country?
4 Regression equation
5 Coefficients
6 Project 5: Investigating a claim about use of masks in preventing Covid-19
7 Concluding thoughts
The Optimal Lockdown Strategy Against Virus Propagation and Economic Loss
1 Introduction
2 The Logistic Equation
3 The Model and Its Responses
References
Research Seminars: A New Hope
Mathematics Indicates That an HIV-Style Strategy Could Be Applied to Manage the Coronavirus
1 Can We Adapt Strategies Used to Fight HIV to Create Strategies to Fight the Coronavirus?
2 The Disease Dilemma: To Mitigate or Not to Mitigate, That Is the Question
2.1 A Dynamical System That Combines Disease Spread with Human Behavior Choices
3 An HIV-Style Strategy to Combat Both the Current and Future Pandemics
3.1 Concluding Remarks: Outsmarting Viruses and Evolving to a New Normal
References
Orchestral Turbulence
Applied Mathematics in the Time of Corona: A Survival Guide
1 A Looming Storm
2 The Shortcomings of Academia
3 My Body for Science
4 The Newfoundland Story
5 Final Proof
References
Glimpses at Corona: La Boqueria and Notre Dame
Soap Bubbles Vanitas Venice
References
Thoughts at the Time of an Epidemic
References
Dancing on Stilts
1 A Child´s Insight
2 The Venue
3 The Zoom Room
4 Generalization
5 Conclusion
Public Engagement 280 Characters at a Time
1 Research and Group Testing
2 Public Engagement via Twitter
3 Lessons About Public Engagement
References
Three Stories on the Importance of Putting It on the Back Burner
1 Foucault Pendulum
2 Cone Eversion
3 Equitangent Problem
References
Solitude Is Conducive to Work and Contemplation
Counting Syllables, Shaping Poems: Reflections
Experimental Math Outreach and Popularization During COVID-19
1 Multi-sensory Experiments Before COVID-19
1.1 On-Line in the Digital Pre-COVID Era
2 Preliminary Examples During COVID-19
3 One Learning Pathway
4 An Extension of a Learning Path
5 Modern Experimental Math
6 Conclusion
Bibliography
Counting Heads: Individual-Based Models of Disease Dynamics
1 Contact Graphs
2 Modelling Disease Spreading
3 Models Based on the Contact Graph
References
