Monday, March 4th, 2002
11:30am - 12:30pm, in Science 1- Small Auditorium

Irene Hueter

University of Florida Gainesville

The contact process: an epidemic model near criticality

Abstract: The contact process involves a random population whose members interact, move and reproduce in space. While Ted Harris introduced the isotropic model in the 1970ies to analyze infectious diseases, a theme that perhaps for obvious reasons promises to be of continued importance well into the present century, it also serves as a model for tumor growth, competition, and the propagation of any computer virus and provides a fruitful labyrinth to study phase transitions. In recent work, I introduced the anisotropic contact process to account for topographic heterogeneities and investigated in which sense the isotropic model's behavior is typical in the richer landscape of the anisotropic model, especially, near the discontinuous phase transition between global and local survival of the population. We will describe the contact process along with its background, discuss selected results, and mention a number of open questions on this spatial stochastic process.