It sounds like everybody enjoyed our day of mathematical biology brought to you by Professor Mogilner and Swati Patel. Applications of mathematics to science are vast, deep, and ever-expanding. Many people are surprised to hear that mathematics can be so successfully applied to biology, probably since these topics haven’t made it very far into the high school curriculum.
Prof. Mogilner’s talk on allometric scaling was based on research published in the 1990s (West_Brown_Enquist_1997) that has been cited thousands of times. Since wikipedia is always a mere click away, you should try to read this. Here is an article that explains the paper a little more clearly than the original: Demystifying the West, Brown & Enquist model of the allometry of metabolism. And, here is an article talking a bit more about the biology of allometry using the example of fiddler crabs with one ginormous claw and one itty-bitty claw. I guess they look like they’re playing the fiddle? Cellist crab might be more apt.
Once you learn about fractals, it’s hard not to see them everywhere in nature.
Swati’s talk about modeling populations provided ideas that get your foot in the door to understanding chaos theory. And who wouldn’t want to know more about chaos??
The only limit to the applications of math is the imagination of the mathematician. We’ll have more professors and graduate students share some examples of applied math with you later this quarter.