Biomathematics: Biology Embracing Mathematics

A Book Review to Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart

Mathematics has long been discovered to be used in one’s life. The application of mathematics to our daily life would be countless in terms of how we include the principles of math to our living. In the early forms of life, mathematics has become a tool to study the science underlying it. No one would ever come to picture in their minds that mathematics and biology could be studied at once. But in this book written by Stewart, he gave substantiation and proofs that biology embraced mathematics long ago before anyone noticed it.

 Biology is the study of life, in all its forms. Life is the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter including the capacity for growth, functional activity and continual change preceding death. That was according to the dictionary. The definition of life according to the biologist: concentrate on what it does rather than what it is.  In which order, growth, reproduction, respond to stimuli, adaptation, regulation and energy process are the features of life. Earthly life is based on carbon, water, organic chemistry, DNA and protein.

Biology was mainly about plants and animals but there were revolutions that changed the way scientist think about life. The first revolution was the microscope. It opened up the complexity of life observation that cannot be seen by the naked eye. It gave way to the discovery of the composition of cells. The second revolution was classification. It brought degree of order to the chaotic world of biology in which the system of nature were put into order and thus were organized. It provided the standard system of naming organisms in terms of species, genus and extensive groupings. The third revolution was evolution. It brought in the mechanism behind the diversity of species. The fourth revolution was genetics. It caused the breakthrough of genes. And the fifth revolution was the structure of DNA. It yield the structure of a complex molecule found in living creatures. The different revolutions indicated that the study of life cannot only be studied through science; it signified that the mathematical ideas should be used for sciences and the demands of biology.

Upon scanning through the contents of the book there were questions that bugged in my mind. Few were: How does mathematics being used to study biology? How did the two complex field of study merge in one? Those questions were filled up and answered. As mentioned by Stewart, there were variety of connections between mathematics and biology. The structure of the viruses, organization of cells, evolution, behavior of organisms and its interaction to the ecosystem were some of those. The mathematics involved were probability, dynamics, chaos theory, symmetry, networks, mechanics, elasticity and knot theory.  The application of mathematical biology concerns with the structure and function of complex molecules, dynamics of ecosystem, work and process of the nervous system and brain, shapes of viruses and the evolutionary ancestry. Moreover, mathematics is being used not just to help manage data or improve instruments but to provide significant insights into the science itself, and to help explain how life works. The application of mathematical insights to biological processes made way to a new branch of learning which is the biomathematics or the mathematical biology that shows how life evolved, how organisms works and relate to its ecosystem and environment. It explains how the techniques and viewpoints of mathematics can help understand not just what life is made from but how it works, on its very smallest molecules to the vast of the entire earth. Mathematical biology shows the interconnections of two different domains can achieve things that are impossible for the individual field.

I come to realize that since mathematics is the science of understanding things, in biology mathematics was just not a way to analyze data about living creatures but a method to understand them. Mathematical discoveries will open up for gigantic realm of revealing simple life processes to do complex things that will bear fruit of more biological inventions.