From biomedical engineering and medical device development to genetic research
and biological process technology, IT researchers play a major role in the growing
field of biotechnology. Here is a look at 13 of the most innovative projects
underway.
Life may look different from mathematics—but
that's because we have the wrong idea about mathematics.
Most people have some sort of mental image of what biologists,
or physicists, or astronomers—or indeed bank managers—do.
They study living creatures; they carry out huge, expensive
experiments on the fundamental constituents of matter;
they look through telescopes at the stars and planets;
or they lend money to people.
I'm not worried here about the extent to which such
images are correct—they capture some of the essential
spirit of those enterprises, even though they are actually
rather wide of the mark when it comes to details.
What concerns me is that when we think of mathematics, the only
mental image that most of us have is what we did at school, and
we tend to assume that this is all the mathematics that exists.
Not so. Mathematics is not a long-dead subject preserved in dusty
tomes, in which all the questions have been solved and all the answers
are listed at the back of the book. It is a vibrant, lively, ever-growing
subject. Indeed, more new mathematics is being created today than
ever before.
Furthermore, this new mathematics is not just ever-more-complicated
answers to bigger and bigger sums. It lies on a far higher conceptual
level. Mathematics is the study of patterns, regularities, rules,
and their consequences—the science of significant form—and
nowhere is form more significant than in biology.
This view of mathematics may sound rather abstruse, but it actually
makes the mathematics of life more interesting and easier to understand
than the prosaic techniques taught at school. A fair analogy is
the difference between practicing scales on a musical instrument
(school mathematics) and composing (creative mathematics). The mathematics
that may one day provide an understanding of life in all of its
richness and depth will be the creative kind, not the prosaic.
From The New Mathematics of the Living World, by Professor Ian
Stewart, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Mathematics and
Its Applications.
The IMA is devoting its 1998-99 program to mathematics in biology,
featuring a series of workshops that will highlight some of the
mathematical challenges emerging from the consideration of biological
issues and will demonstrate how mathematics can be applied to their
resolution. The program will focus on particularly rich areas of
investigation that complement activities carried out at the IMA
in previous years, including magnetic resonance imaging, molecular
biology and neurobiology. The fall quarter component will focus
on “Theoretical Problems in Developmental Biology and Immunology,”
with “Mathematical Problems in Physiology” and “Dynamic
Models of Ecosystems and Epidemics” following in winter and
spring.
For more information call 612-624-6066
or see www.ima.umn.edu.
