BioMath: Combination at its Best

                To every great discovery, there's always an amazing behind-the-scenes that paved way to the revelation of a new idea. Example, for a movie to become a blockbuster hit, the story should captivate the attention of the viewers, of course, with the guidance and efforts made by the editors, scriptwriters, director, actors and the like. The Mathematics of Life covered all that, showing how Mathematics contributed to the advancement of the concepts and information (like genetics, DNA and evolution) that made biology one of the most studied field, and how the information we gathered from these concepts became helpful in understanding the physical and biological phenomena and patterns occurring in human and other forms of life.

                As I opened the PDF file of the book "The Mathematics of Life" written by Ian Stewart, the first image that I saw were numbers, in different sizes and positions, forming an elephant, clearly denoting that there could be a potential relationship between Math and Biology. What that relationship could be was the question answered by Stewart in his book. 

                First thing that I quickly observed on the book was how Stewart carefully elaborated and explained that mathematics is not just applied to concepts involving power, inertia, gravity or concepts denoting physical characteristics of things. He clarified that mathematics is not just used to explain a certain event quantitatively and even pointed out that a science concept with no quantitative data does not imply that math was not used in the whole process of gathering the evidences.

                Unifying, the book imposed one thing: to unfold the role of mathematics in rebuilding and re-establishing the concepts of biology. First, he tackled the history of the discovery of the first five revolutions in biology: the microscope, classification, evolution, genetics and DNA. He exposed some highlights on how each revolution was discovered and how it became important to the discovery of a new idea. Then, he revealed the sixth revolution in biology which was mostly misunderstood for its features that are complicated, highly designed for critical minds and slightly confusing. Mathematics. Mathematics was given a recognition it did not deserved. While most people think of mathematics as a subject full of numbers, mathematicians always claimed the fact that math is composed of a greater scope including logic, statistics, process or symmetry needed in the field of biology.

                Mathematics and biology worked hand-in-hand in order to expose the structures, patterns, and shapes of the molecular objects we see in the microscope as well as the motion or movement of the organelles found inside the body. These two fields showed the characteristics of objects that are viewed using the biological apparatuses and are interpreted through the use of mathematical models for easier understanding. What really got me was the fact that mathematics was used in order to interpret the patterns or designs we see in a shell, in a zebra, in a boxfish or anything having spots and stripes. Who would have thought these patterns need linear or a more complex equation to identify if it would form a regular or irregular pattern? 

                Moreover, the book gave me insights on petal formation of flowers as well as the gestation of animals. "How many petals could a flower presumably have?" or "How many foals could there be when all horses gave birth?" became more interesting topics for me.

                The book discussed so much about biology and forms of life that it arose to my interest in analyzing the forms of life and restudying the concepts that I have learned in the past like nucleic acids, sequencing, phylogenetic tree, amino acids, proteins, the brain and even Charles Darwin's famous finches.

                As I was reading the book, I observed that there were some parts that were slightly confusing because the terminologies used were overly smart. I had a hard time relating myself as a student to what he tries to explain especially on the last part since some of the concepts are not well explained and was difficult to understand. But overall, I found the book very, very interesting. I discovered so much about biology with the the help of mathematics that I never learned in just plain biology lectures. I became aware of the presence and importance of mathematics in characterizing the patterns, structures and formations we see in the biological world.

                The book gave us a very scientific and mathematical outlook of everything around us. With this book, I can really say that mathematics and biology or Biomathematics can be a great combination that would give real justification to the real world of biology and all fields of science.