Redefining the Norm

   
         Mathematics has been very helpful to humanity for thousands of years. It has been primitively used before to measure a farmer’s land for taxation purposes, calculate distances and angles of elevation. The image of mathematics have been slowly changing. In chemistry, particularly analytical chemistry, mathematics became a useful tool especially in understanding concepts of chemical phenomena. Mathematics is the language of physics, one should learn the different concepts of mathematics in order to gain a clear comprehension to its topics. Now, the book, Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart has shown how mathematics has proven its worth not just by analysing data but became a way in understanding them.

        The book mainly discusses on how mathematics became the partner of the fastest growing branch of modern science, biology. While reading the book, every page excites me, they might say that it is odd when mathematics is applied to biology but I deem that the world really needs maths especially when things become complex in order to increase our understanding to the different topics concerned.

        The author, Ian Stewart stated in his book the concepts about Fibonacci and Lucas sequences and its relationship to nature. Plants, particularly shows a repeated specific particularly in plants for example, the number of petals in a flower, the way leaves are arranged in a stem and the geometry in seed heads. Stewart also shared his insights about taxonomy and talked about Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’.

       Stewart also explained in his book about genetics, he discussed about Gregor Mendel and clearly expounded the idea about the probabilities in breeding plants. It only shows that Mendel’s experiments involves numerical relationship, for example, calculating the probability of the characteristics of the offspring of two cross-fertilised plants. He also discussed about the reproduction of cells of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Eukaryotes reproduce through mitosis and meiosis while prokaryotes reproduce through binary fission.

        The book also tackled about Alan Turing’s work, he used reaction and diffusion as his two main ingredients in modelling the creation of patterns (spots, stripes and etc.) in animals during embryonic development. He visualized a system of chemicals which acts as a form-generators called morphogens. These morphogens react together and form other molecules. The molecules and its reaction products will disperse and travels across the skin at any direction.

        Aside from being easy to comprehend, the topics inside the book are very interesting. This reading material really have aided me to understand more about the biology. I would like to recommend this book especially to students who have a great interest in biology or in mathematics and to greatly appreciate the team-up of the two different fields. This book explains how mathematicians and biologists have come hand in hand to be able to answer the different dilemmas that the humanity have been facing today and to gain more knowledge to the nature of life.