John Baez

African Mathematics Seminar, November 2, 2022

Category Theory in Epidemiology

Category theory provides a general framework for building models of dynamical systems. We explain this framework and illustrate it with the example of "stock and flow diagrams". These diagrams are widely used for simulations in epidemiology. Although tools already exist for drawing these diagrams and solving the systems of differential equations they describe, we have created a new software package called StockFlow which uses ideas from category theory to overcome some limitations of existing software. We illustrate this with code in StockFlow that implements a simplified version of a COVID-19 model used in Canada. This is joint work with Xiaoyan Li, Sophie Libkind, Nathaniel Osgood and Evan Patterson.

You can see the talk slides here and watch the video above.

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© 2022 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu

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