Meteorology can seem like a black-art with the meteorologist producing forecasts that somehow seem to contradict what you are reading from the charts.

For epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, and health-care professionals, real-time and predictive modeling of infectious disease is of growing importance. This book provides a timely and comprehensive introduction to the modeling of infectious diseases in humans and animals, focusing on recent developments as well as more traditional approaches.

Matt Keeling and Pejman Rohani move from modeling with simple differential equations to more recent, complex models, where spatial structure, seasonal "forcing," or stochasticity influence the dynamics, and where computer simulation...