Extinction Recalculation - Predicting the Future using Branching Processes - Dr Sam Tickle
29th February 2020
We seem to live in very volatile times: new epidemics can spread with frightening speed; species once abundant are suddenly endangered; and queues for everything appear to be getting longer and longer.
All of these are systems that evolve in a discrete fashion, in which the number of subjects of interest is heavily dependent on the immediate past. Informally, we can think of this as moving from one generation to the next as time passes, in much the same way as the number of people in each generation of a family tree is influenced by the number of people in the previous generation.
We'll take a look at a powerful area of probability theory which helps us to understand such processes, in order to try and answer some questions of importance for the future: Will passport control ever get a free moment at Heathrow Airport? Just how widely can a new disease such as coronavirus spread? And, perhaps most personally, what is the chance of your surname dying out at some point in the future?