The Galton-Watson branching process as a quantitative tool in parasitology.

Stochastic growth processes abound in the biology of parasitism, and one mathematical tool that is particularly well suited for describing such phenomena is the Galton-Watson branching process. Introduced more than a century ago to settle a debate over the rate of disappearance of surnames in the British peerage, branching processes are applied today in fields as diverse as quantum physics and theoretical computer science. In this article, Dale Taneyhill, Alison Dunn and Melanie Hatcher provide a simple introduction to branching processes, and demonstrate their uses in quantitative parasitology.