The ten-year-old who published a Nature paper

A remarkable – but oft-forgotten – mathematical CV

I want to tell you a brief story about a mathematician you’ve probably never heard of, but whose work helped shape some ideas that have been crucial to scientific research, particularly in recent years.

While researching The Rules of Contagion, I learnt more about Hilda Hudson. The daughter of a mathematician, she had published her first research when she was aged 10, in the journal Nature. It was a new proof of Euclid’s 9th proposition from the 2nd book of his classic text The Elements.

She then studied maths at Cambridge where she got first class marks in 1903. At the time, women weren’t allowed to get degrees, so – despite matching the male student who came 7th in the year – her performance wasn’t included in the official listing. (It wasn’t until 1948 that women were allowed to receive Cambridge degrees.)

In 1916, Hudson worked on a pair of papers with Ronald Ross, who’d won the Nobel Prize for establishing the role of mosquitoes in malaria transmission. These papers outlined mathematical models for ‘laws of happenings’ - an early attempt at establishing a theory of epidemic dynamics.

The work would later inspire Kermack and McKendrick to outline their landmark susceptible-infectious-recovered epidemic model in 1927.

In turn, the research that followed would eventually give rise to the field of infectious disease dynamics. And the mathematical thresholds in those early models would evolve into a simpler metric for contagion: the reproduction number. This concept, along with the mathematics of epidemic dynamics, underpinned almost all quantitative analysis during the COVID pandemic. (As I’ve written about previously, we can’t avoid using such models when analysing data, whether we realise it or not.)

Yet because of the First World War, Hudson didn’t publish any more work on epidemiology after those two papers. In 1917, she joined the Air Ministry to work on aircraft design, work for which she later got an OBE.

Perhaps most remarkably, epidemiology and aeronautical engineering were effectively side projects. Her main academic research was focused on pure maths, notably geometry.

It’s a reminder that scientific progress isn’t driven only by the most well-known figures. If we truly want to understand how science unfolded in the past – and how to advance it in the future – we should therefore look beyond the familiar accounts. Because there can be some remarkable people and stories waiting beneath.

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There are more stories of researchers you probably haven’t heard of, despite the world-changing importance of their ideas, in my upcoming book Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty, which is available to pre-order now.

Cover image: Bogdan Todoran via Unsplash.