Question: You say in your profile that you tackle problems each day, are there any particular significant ones?? Or equally ones that keep coming up on a day to day basis, and how do you go about tackling it?

Christina Pagel answered on 18 Jun 2013:

ooh good questions…
I guess what i mean is that I work on projects (each of which last about 1-3 years normally) and each project is about finding the solution to a specific problem (e.g. “should we vaccinate against pneumonia in a flu pandemic if we know that a lot of deaths in a pandemic are from secondary pneumonia?” or “how many intensive care beds are we likely need in 2 days time?”)… Typically i work on about 3-5 projects at any one time.

But part of doing these projects does mean tackling similar problems over and over again – and one really important one is how to communicate quite complicated maths to doctors and hospital managers. It’s something i’m always learning how to do better… related to this is the problem of working out what the *actual* problem is from what people tell you the problem is…

A really good example of what I mean there is actually from world war II when my branch of maths (operational research) started… Air force chiefs kept track of the damage to planes that were coming back and ordered that the engineers concentrate on strengthening and protecting the bits that came back the most damaged. A mathematician (Blackett) working with the UK air force said that was wrong – they needed to strengthen and protect the bits on planes that were never damaged… the air force chief though he was mad until the mathematician explained that clearly the planes that had those “undamaged” areas hit in combat weren’t coming back, whereas the parts that the chief saw were damaged clearly didn’t stop the planes coming back and so weren’t vital.

So, a key bit of my job is trying to work out if the apparent problem is actually the real problem!