Flattening the curve and the third derivative
Caveat lector: I am not an expert on epidemiology, mathematical biology, or even applied mathematics in general. I am a pure mathematician , but I am also a math teacher, and at the undergraduate level that often means teaching calculus. It is that experience which informs the thoughts below. There is an anecdote that sometimes gets told in freshman calculus classes which I'll call "Richard Nixon and the third derivative". It goes something like this: While running for re-election in 1972, President Nixon sought to reassure the nation by announcing that the “ rate of increase of inflation was decreasing ” . To understand the context of this story in the classroom, it’s worth knowing a little bit about differential calculus, the mathematical study of rates of change. Suppose you have a quantity which changes over time. The rate at which that quantity changes is called its derivative . For example, if the original quantity describes the distance an object has traveled fro...