like boiling water or things like that really require a different kind of mathematics. And that's important for thinking about various real world systems because dependencies actually matter and statistics and correlations are not adequate. So about 15 years ago, one of the topics I started working on over the last number of years was the issue of pandemics. And it started from a very simple model of the effect of long range transportation on pathogen dynamics. And the result of our analysis was that there was a transition like boiling of water that happens as you add more and more transportation. What happens is you go from a situation where you have local extinctions because the pathogen spreads locally to global extinctions as the pathogen is able to spread globally. And that transition is a sharp transition, which means that you're going along adding more flights around the world and you are getting close to that transition and all of a sudden instead of having small local events (10/41)
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