A fiat lux seminar on the interplay of mathematics and biology.
Unquestionably, one of the most striking changes in the panorama of biological sciences of the last decade has been the tremendous increase of data collected: the entire genome of multiple organisms have been sequenced; novel types of experiments have been designed that allow measurements of behavior in the cells of tens of thousands of genes at the same time; etc. All this information comes in a form that is easy to store on a computer: sequences of letters and numbers. How to interpret it, however, is still largely unknown. In order to respond to this challenge, researchers involved in biology have turned to mathematicians and statisticians in a way that is unprecedented. In the past, other sciences have used quantitative analysis to a large extent: physics discoveries have gone hand in hand with mathematical developments, for example. At the beginning of the 20th century, some social sciences, such as economics, underwent a ``mathematization''. Is this going to happen to life sciences? What is the role that mathematics and statistics are going to play here? Do we need to invent a new mathematics? How can we define the emerging field of ``Bioinformatics''? We will explore the characteristics of the applications of mathematics and statistics in the life sciences by contrasting it with Physics and Economics, and by reviewing some specific examples as population genetics, and DNA sequence analysis.
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