Abstract: On 4 April Dr Richard Lessells, Prof Yunus Moosa and Prof Tulio de Oliveira were tasked with conducting an outbreak investigation at St. Augustine’s Hospital in Durban, where 13 COVID-19 cases had been detected and two deaths had been recorded. Over the next few weeks, they pieced together how the virus had entered the

Abstract: Modelling the spread of epidemics has a long history and applies a number of concepts from applied mathematics and statistics to public health. I will review this subject from a largely historical perspective and try to explain why the different models do not agree. I will also try to explain some of the challenges

Abstract:  To understand the typical dynamics of an open quantum system we introduce an ensemble of random Lindblad operators, which generate completely positive Markovian evolution in the space of the density matrices. The spectral properties of these operators, including the shape of the eigenvalue distribution in the complex plane, are evaluated by using methods of free