Visiting lecturer: Fabio Milner

Fabio Milner is Professor of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Mathematics Education at Arizona State University. He earned the degree of Licenciado en Matemáticas from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Master's and PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago. His early research was in numerical analysis of elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations. After a few years he gravitated toward applications of mathematics in demography and epidemiology, and later on into immunology and education. Many of his interests in demography are captured in his book with Mimmo Iannelli and Maia Martcheva. Lately he has started to work on modeling tumor growth and possible mechanisms of trade-off between selection for reduced apoptosis or for increased proliferation.

Professor Milner will lecture on the use of mathematical models in demography and the different kinds of insights that they can provide, as well as some of their limitations. He will go through a brief historical perspective from the early XIIIth century to the present time, using discrete models, matrices, dynamical systems, partial differential equations, and stochastic models. He will show how mathematical models incorporate the concepts of survival probability, life expectancy, generation length, and also how they naturally lead to estimates of essential parameters such as the net reproductive rate and exponential growth/decay rate.