Current course offerings

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Course description

Mathematical biology is an approach to understanding biological processes that is growing very rapidly in importance. It deals with mathematical models of biological phenomena in such diverse areas as neuroscience, physiology, ecology, genetics and medicine. Unlike many phenomena in the physical sciences to which mathematics has been widely and successfully applied for a very long time, biological phenomena tend to be characterized by a high degree of variability and complexity. The challenge in modelling them typically lies in identifying a small enough set of variables or aspects for the mathematics to be tractable, without failing completely to capture the essence of what is happening. Unlike in many mathematics courses where much time is spent on finding solutions to well-defined mathematical problems, in this course a significant amount of time will be spent on the art of constructing models of biological systems, and also on the interpretation of solutions of these new sorts of models.

While this will inevitably involve learning some specific biology, the ability to turn complicated biological phenomena into tractable mathematical models is widely applicable, also beyond Biology. The mathematics used will include ordinary and partial differential equations, probability and statistics.

Archived offerings