The Team-up of the Century (A Review of Mathematics of Life)

“Mathematicians like nothing better than a rich source of new questions. Biologists, rightly, will be impressed only by the answers.”

When I first heard that biology is already teamed up with mathematics in one way or another, I really thought it was some kind of a revolution. Given that there seemed to have a barrier between mathematics and science before, biomathematics seemed to be a very new and complex approach to science. Perhaps the earliest teaming up of math and science that I knew was in elementary when we would jot down the number of seedlings we would plant, for example, or the height of the grown-up seedlings for certain number of weeks since we planted it. It was usually in table form and we would solve for the average height that the seedling makes every week. That was my earliest knowledge of how mathematics essentially works with science and gradually dismissed it when I came to college and pursued an Arts degree.

            The lecture of mathematician May Anne Mata helped me see how vast and broad the reaches of mathematics could be in the different fields of science. At first, I thought math only helps science in coming up with numerical solutions to problems with data provided by science already. But with Ma’am Mata’s lecture, I learned that with mathematics’ help, there are actually new discoveries made – discoveries which without math may not be possible at all. As what Ian Stewart’s said in the preface of his book Mathematics of Life, “Modern discoveries in biology have opened up a host of important questions, and many of them are unlikely to be answered without significant mathematical input.” With Ma’am Mata’s and Stewart’s insights put together, I somehow had a clear grasp of how essential the role of mathematics actually is to the development of science in terms of new discoveries and ventures made.

            In the first chapter of The Mathematics of Life, he mentioned Gregor Mendel, the friar who observed the variety of the offspring of his planted peas. He observed that there were certain patterns with the physical characteristics of the peas through different generations. Here is where mathematics enters the picture. Mathematics loves patterns. With these, limitations are set and it would be easier to see how a thing works, or in Mendel’s case, how his peas looked the way they looked. Patterns are essential data in coming up with mathematical solutions to biological problems.

Perhaps the chapter that I like the most was the Taxonomy chapter, Chapter 3. I was amazed at how they found out how many species of animals were inside Noah’s Ark (presumably it was considered scientifically true), just by solving for the area of the ark. By doing so, too, they were convinced that indeed the ark was enough to house all the species humans has ever discovered so far. “…Buteo and Kircher have proved geometrically that, taking the common cubit of a foot and a half, the ark was abundantly sufficient for all the animals supposed to be lodged in it.” Also, with Carl Linnaeus’ classification of the animals, he somehow let mathematics enter the limelight of science. With simply “counting plant organs” it paved way to mathematics important role to other discoveries. The “striking patterns of numbers and shapes observed in the leaves and flowers of plants” was what they continually took note of until they came up with concrete conclusions. Patterns were also the key in determining the “strange numerology of the plant kingdom”.

In a video installment shown in class, I remembered about Leonardo (Fibonacci) of Pisa who made his rabbits experiment. This experiment still had something to do with the genetics and heredity of the mother rabbit and how many offspring will be until the next, next generations. This experiment was also had something to do with the study of fractions. According to Stewart, in studying for the fractions they realized that “as the numbers increase, the fraction gets closer and closer to a particular value”. This was exactly how the value of pi was discovered. I remembered in the video installment shown, the first attempts of finding out the value of pi was through several trials and errors, keeping in mind the law of fraction stated above. It was interesting how not only mathematics could work for science; it could pretty be vice versa as well.

Another amazing chapter was Chapter 4 where the first mention of the Golden Ration was. The specific arrangement of the petals in single flower and the leaves in a stalk (phyllotaxis) was very much determinable using the Golden ratio. It was according to Helmut Vogel that the exact value of the ratio is 137.5. It was interesting how a slight change in this ratio could result in an obvious difference in the arrangement of the petal/seeds, for example. Vogel tried to figure how the arrangements were with the ratio 137 and 138 respectively. Even with the very minimal adjustments, the change in arrangements of the petals was very obvious. This experiment/discovery, I think, is one of the most vital experiments that science had when teamed with mathematics.

As Stewart puts it, mathematical biology (and other field of science for that matter), can be considered the sixth revolution that man has ever made. It will be opening doors to newer discoveries in the next centuries. Indeed, mathematics has reached far more than the stereotypical computations and numerical solutions. With mathematics teaming up with science, or vice versa, the purpose and practical use of math is much more evident and understood by almost everyone.