Lifesaving Mathematical Biology

Dr Steven Le Comber talked to students about the joys and uses of mathematical biology- starting at the very beginning about the links of maths and crime.

Le Comber started off the talk with a crime scene speculation- Operation Lynx, one of Britain’s largest crime threads- a link of abductions, rapes and violent sex attacks. With over 268,000 suspects, we wouldn’t ever know where to start, would we? We have all seen those police shows where the problem is that there aren’t any suspects, however in real life the problem is that there are too many suspects. There is no way the police force could ever collect the fingerprints and DNA of 5.4 million people to solve the gruesome crimes, yet it is possible to narrow it down to a small amount of people.

Already, the top suspects are likely to have had a criminal record and a vague description existed of the criminal, yet that still wouldn’t have narrowed the suspect list down to the specifics. However, we have mathematical probability on our side.

He worked out the probability of him committing a crime in London (where he lives) and it turns out that a person is more likely to commit a crime nearer to where they live.

“Cumbria is a nice place, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t go there to murder someone.” He said jokingly, showing the students the statistics of where he would most likely murder someone.

However, he later told the audience that this conditional probability was still not accurate enough to find the criminal, or pinpoint the place where the criminal resides, so they turn to a method called the Gibbs sampler.

The Gibbs sampler is used to approximate (in this particular case) where the criminal lives. They do this by finding two sources, such as where the crime occurred, to track the crime, but this usually doesn’t make much sense. This means they then switch these sources until they can close it down on the area left behind, the criminal’s house in this case. In this particular case, they managed to track down and arrest the criminal. After that case, Dr Steven Le Comber used the same data technique to attempt to find out where Banksy lived. News broke about Banksy’s real identity the week before, and so he wanted to test his data out. After it worked, Dr Steven published a document on social media how this worked to help prevent terrorism, however people misinterpreted it to think that Banksy was a terrorist on social media.

Le Comber then told the audience that they can apply these mathematics to biology in medical situations. In 2005, a research team used the Gibbs sampler to track mosquito larvae and malaria outbreaks and where they are in relation to each other. In Cairo, they looked at all standing water in a 300 square feet to track the clusters of mosquitoes. They could then determine where the breakouts were coming from and could prevent them in the future through this method.

Mathematical biology can literally save lives, yet we believe it is boring?