In Part 3 Julia refines our model to use one of the most important numbers in disease modelling. And there's a chance for you to explore its meaning using a new interactivity.

In the final Part we explore what other aspects we need to consider to make a model more realistic. There's an interactivity that allows you to party, commute, and visit friends and we find out more about what life as a research is like from Julia.

In this final part, you can meet the researchers themselves and find out about the real research questions that Julia and some of her colleagues are working on!

Find out the basics of the SIR model, the basis most disease modellers use to understand the spread of a disease through a population.

The reproduction ratio, R, is one of the most important numbers in epidemiology. Find out what it means in this very easy introduction.

To work out how a disease will spread you need to know the time between infections.

How can we use mathematics to model the spread of a disease?

The doubling time of a disease is the time it takes for the number of cases of the disease to double. How do you calculate it?

What is the growth rate and what does it tell us about an epidemic?

Mathematics plays a central role in understanding how infectious diseases spread. This collection of articles looks at some basic concepts in epidemiology to help you understand this fascinating and important field, and set you up for further study.