Preface To Students: How to Get the Most from This Text
Dear students working from this text: I hope you enjoy and learn a lot from these pages! My plan when writing has been to encourage active learning. This means that written explanations are kept to a minimum, and there are lots of chances for you to try things on your own or with other students. The book is filled with applications to real outbreaks; examples inspired by outbreaks; and applications to ideas that do not involve epidemics at all, but that can be represented by similar mathematics as what we use to study diseases. The types of mathematical models studied in this text are used currently in the world, by people making decisions about public policy and for other wide-reaching goals, and I want you to emerge from using this text with a strong sense of what these models can, and cannot, tell us.
The chapters in this text are typically structured in a consistent way.
- The Goals of the chapter appear at the very start.
- After a brief introduction, an Exploration activity asks you to engage with questions that motivate the rest of the chapter.
- The sections within the chapter include some reading for you to do, and Activities appear frequently. It is best if you do these activities when they appear: many activities contain new information, rather than just examples, and later reading will assume you have already completed the activities. Some activities include hints or answers, and you will learn the most by completing as much of the activity as you can before checking the hints or reading the answers.
- At the end of each chapter, there are questions For Further Thought that provide deeper insights or additional examples of the chapter’s ideas.
The Glossary near the end of the book includes descriptions of key terms, along with the chapter in which each term first appears.
There are footnotes in this book, appearing as a raised number. In the web version of the book, clicking on the raised number shows the footnote in a box that opens below the paragraph. The web version of the book also contains live links. Some of the links, such as to chapters, take you to different pages of the book. Other links, such as to figures or equations that we saw earlier in the text, open a box showing these figures or equations directly where you are reading, so that you can see them without jumping from webpage to webpage. You will also see Python code boxes in this text, with a button after that says
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Here is an example of a footnote!
Evaluate (Sage). In the web version of this text, you can click on the Evaluate (Sage) button to evaluate the code directly within the book.For readers using an electronic PDF of this book, many things are similar to the web version, but the live links to equations and figures will lead to the original location of those items within the text, rather than opening them within a box within the page you are reading.
For anyone not using the web version of this text, the Python code will not run directly, which requires you to set up some way to run Python on your computer. There are many ways to do this. Suggestions include (and are not limited to): copying the code directly into the box at the top of the page at sagecell.sagemath.org, using Google Colab at colab.research.google.com, or downloading an installation of Python directly from python.org.
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sagecell.sagemath.org/4
colab.research.google.com/5
www.python.org/Last but not least: I will not tell you how to think. Mathematical modeling involves setting priorities and incorporating personal values, and each person gets to decide these for themselves. This book focuses on the processes of developing and describing models, stating and supporting your assumptions, and understanding and explaining your model’s outcomes. The mathematics certainly needs to be correct, and all the processes should be done carefully, but priorities and values are personal.
Thank you for reading!
