The Disease that Infected Half the World: Mathematics, Biology, and History

We detail a student project that incorporates the story of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, which, between the summer of 1918 and the spring of 1919, infected one-fifth to one-half of the world's population and killed more U.S. soldiers fighting in World War I than the war itself. The project uses Susceptible, Infected, Recovered, and Dead (SIRD) models to track the progress of the disease in San Francisco. Students learn about the search for the pathogen responsible for the devastation and the attempts to contain the outbreak. As many of these methods were quite extreme, there is a natural opportunity to discuss current events and the tension between individual freedom and the protection of the whole. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of PRIMUS for the following free supplemental resources: Sample Solution and Appendix.].