Invited review: Epidemics on social networks

Abstract

Since its first formulations almost a century ago, mathematical models fordisease spreading contributed to understand, evaluate and control the epidemic processes.They promoted a dramatic change in how epidemiologists  thought of the propagation of infectious diseases.In the last decade, when the traditional epidemiological models seemed to be exhausted,  new types of models were developed.These new models incorporated concepts from graph theory to describe and model the underlying social structure.Many of these works  merely produced a more detailed extension of the previous results,  but some otherstriggered a completely new paradigm  in the mathematical study of epidemic processes. In this review, we will introduce the basicconcepts of epidemiology, epidemic  modeling and networks, to finally provide a brief description of the mostrelevant results in the field.

Received: 6 April 2013,  Accepted: 3 June 2013; Edited by: G. Mindlin; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4279/PIP.050003

Cite as: M N Kuperman, Papers in Physics 5, 050003 (2013)