Modeling Biological Systems: Principles and Applications

"This book fills a much needed gap," or so Moses Hadas (1900-1966, Columbia University Professor of Classical Literature) is reputed to have cynically said of another author's efforts. The gap that pertains to the present work is that between traditional biology subject matter and applied mathematics. The twenty-first century is touted as the century of mathematical biology, by which we mean that many of the important practical as well as theoretically interesting problems involve biological systems of such complexity that traditional experimental analysis must be coupled with mathematical synthesis. Other authors have noted the need to expose biology students to greater quantitative training and have provided biologist-friendly introductions to computer simulation focused on a variety of biological subdisciplines. I continue to think we need a general textbook, applicable to a wide range of biological systems, but with enough rigor that some of the depth of the underlying mathematical and computational substance can be appreciated by biology students. This necessarily removes biologists from their intellectual comfort zone, but my goal is to perturb the mind, and my hope is that a student's current knowledge base is an unstable equilibrium.