The student will learn the stochastic theory of epidemics and infectious disease transmission.
This will include the theory of random phenomena that is concerned with the flow of events in time
and space, especially those exhibiting highly variable behavior that can be described by probability
distributions. Specifically, the student will learn to deal with the branching process, random walks,
martingales, Markov processes, Poisson process, birth and death processes as applied to epidemic
theory. There will be an emphasis on learning methods of strong scientific importance as opposed to
purely mathematical theory.