Epidemiology & Infection probably attracts more papers on mathematical modelling of infectious diseases than does any other epidemiology journal. The most important modelling papers published in the journal were probably those of Anderson and May during the 1980s, which laid the foundations for much of the subsequent modelling work carried out by themselves and their colleagues. Since the start of their partnership, they authored 17 articles between them in the journal, including work quantifying the effect of different vaccination strategies against measles and rubella [1, 2], on the epidemiology of rubella in the United Kingdom [3], and on the effect of age-dependent contact between individuals on the critical level of vaccination coverage required for control [4]. The latter work, published in 1985, was particularly important, since it described methods for incorporating realistic assumptions about (heterogeneous) mixing between individuals into models, an issue which was beginning to be addressed in the mathematical literature but which had not yet reached many epidemiological journals. Other important modelling work published in Epidemiology and Infection includes that of McLean et al. (reproduced in this edition) on the control of measles in developing countries [5, 6], and by Garnett and Grenfell on the epidemiology of varicella zoster in developed countries [7, 8].