Is Life Truly Mathematical? Exploring the Connection Between Biology and Math 🔢

Biology certainly uses mathematical methods, but in a seemingly different way to the "hard" sciences of physics and chemistry.

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#biology #math #modelling

SOURCES + FURTHER READING:

Golding, N., Price, D. J., Ryan, G., McVernon, J., McCaw, J. M., & Shearer, F. M. (2021). Estimating the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 during periods of high, low and zero case incidence. medRxiv. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.28.21264509v1

Hutchinson, J. R., & Garcia, M. (2002). Tyrannosaurus was not a fast runner. Nature, 415(6875), 1018-1021. https://www.nature.com/articles/4151018a

Chauvet, E., Paullet, J. E., Previte, J. P., & Walls, Z. (2002). A Lotka-Volterra Three-Species Food Chain. Mathematics Magazine, 75(4), 243–255. https://doi.org/10.2307/3219158 Mitchell, S. D. (2000).

Dimensions of scientific law. Philosophy of Science, 67(2), 242-265. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/392774

Frigg, R., & Hartmann, S. (2006). Models in science. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/models-science/

Pigliucci, M. (2002, January). Are ecology and evolutionary biology" soft" sciences?. In Annales Zoologici Fennici (pp. 87-98). Finnish Zoological and Botanical Publishing Board https://philpapers.org/rec/PIGAEA

Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A., Green, T., Figurnov, M., Ronneberger, O., ... & Hassabis, D. (2021). Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature, 596(7873), 583-589. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2

https://www.burnet.edu.au/projects/467_covasim_modelling_covid_19 (Burnet Institute Modelling)

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/computational-biology-market (Growth rate of computational biology)

https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/74214/the-lotka-volterra-predator-prey-model (Code for Lotka-Volterra Simulation in Mathematica provided by m_goldberg and Szabolcs)

https://xkcd.com/435/ (Comic about ‘purity’ of sciences)

Life’s Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive - Carl Zimmer https://carlzimmer.com/books/lifes-edge/

Infinite Powers - Steven Strogatz https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/infinite-powers

The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance - Ernst Mayr