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Erika Mansnerus: Explanatory and Predictive Functions of Simulation Modelling Case
Explanatory and Predictive Functions of Simulation Modelling Case
(p. 177 – 193)

Erika Mansnerus

Explanatory and Predictive Functions of Simulation Modelling Case
Haemophilus Influenzae Type b Dynamic Transmission Models

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  • programming / coding
  • history of technology
  • computer science
  • computer simulation
  • computer
  • history of science

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Erika Mansnerus

Erika Mansnerus is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and LSE Health, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on how modelling techniques function at the interface of public health research and policy-making. Prior to her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, she was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (2009). After finishing her PhD in sociology and philosophy of science, at the University of Helsinki (2006), she came to the UK to work as a postdoctoral researcher in an ESRC/Leverhulme Trust funded »Nature of Evidence: How Well Do ›Facts‹ Travel?« project (led by Prof. Mary Morgan at the Economic History Department, 2006–2008). In this interdisciplinary project, she studied the dissemination of model-based ›facts‹ across different research communities and to national health policies.

Gabriele Gramelsberger (ed.): From Science to Computational Sciences

In 1946 John von Neumann stated that science is stagnant along the entire front of complex problems, proposing the use of largescale computing machines to overcome this stagnation. In other words, Neumann advocated replacing analytical methods with numerical ones. The invention of the computer in the 1940s allowed scientists to realise numerical simulations of increasingly complex problems like weather forecasting, and climate and molecular modelling. Today, computers are widely used as computational laboratories, shifting science toward the computational sciences. By replacing analytical methods with numerical ones, they have expanded theory and experimentation by simulation.

During the last decades hundreds of computational departments have been established all over the world and countless computer-based simulations have been conducted. This volume explores the epoch-making influence of automatic computing machines on science, in particular as simulation tools.

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