Discover the real-world applications our research has, from health outcomes to show business
With over 70 academic staff passionate about their mathematics, the School of Mathematical Sciences is an exciting place to be for those who share our love of mathematical discovery.
Below you can learn more about some of our research in the School of Mathematical Sciences.
Maths has a number of exciting and creative functions, and recent research undertaken by Dr Lucas Lacasa, Vito Latora and Oliver Williams shows that this applies to the world of show business.
By using data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Lacasa, Latora and Williams analysed the careers of millions of actors between 1888 (when the first film was made) up until 2016. After analysing this data, they were able to predict cinematic success.
The team found that an actor's most productive year (defined as the year with the largest number of credited jobs) is towards the beginning of their career. The research also shed light on the fact that, for around 70 per cent of actors, their career will only for a year, meaning that one-hit wonders tend to be the norm.
Dr Lucas Lacasa, one of the authors of the study said: “This research has sparked a lot of attention from unexpected places including from a screenwriter from the film industry who is now developing a movie script partly based on our findings.”
In the School of Mathematical Sciences, researchers are changing the way that malaria interventions programmes work to improve life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Jamie Griffin is a Lecturer in Applied Probability. His main research area is modelling malaria transmission and control. This research has involved synthesising multiple types of data to be able to make predictions of the impact of interventions in reducing malaria transmission. He has advised policy makers at the WHO on a number of questions covering vaccines and other interventions against malaria.
The Global Fund (GF) raises money to finance intervention campaigns to control malaria, HIV and TB. Griffin has worked as part of an advisory group which assists with the allocation of funding within the malaria control programmes of the GF. The programmes’ aims are to reduce the number of deaths from malaria, and also cases of the disease. During 2017 to 2019 the GF plans to distribute around $4 billion to these programmes, and such advice is crucial to achieving their aims.
In 2016 Griffin and co-authors evaluated the relative cost-effectiveness of introducing the RTS,S malaria vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa compared with further scale-up of existing interventions. The finding was remarkable, namely that the vaccine should generally only be implemented after very high coverage has been achieved of other interventions.
The work implies that coverage of nets, house spraying and seasonal drugs should generally remain of higher priority across sub-Saharan Africa when compared to the vaccine. This was particularly the case within settings where universal coverage of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets has not yet been achieved.
Malaria is one of the leading causes of death and morbidity, estimated as causing over 200 million clinical cases and 440,000 deaths worldwide annually. The significance of Griffin and his collaborators’ work lies in optimising the Global Fund’s malaria control programmes by identifying the most cost-effective combinations of interventions. This research has been used to advise to the Global Fund on which combinations of malaria interventions are most cost-effective given local conditions. This will enable greater impact by increasing the number of cases and deaths that a given amount of funding can avert.