Commentary: New mathematical physics needed for life sciences
Abstract
The complexities of biological structure and function far exceed those in any other discipline. The evolution of living organisms began four billion years ago and has involved untold numbers of configurations of a few chemical elements on many different scales of length and time. Unraveling some of those complexities challenges the mathematics and physics communities to train a new generation of scientists. (See, for example, the article by Rob Phillips and Steve Quake, Physics Today, May 2006, page 38.)In the past 15 years, new technologies have allowed biologists to see biological functions in vivo at an unprecedentedly high spatiotemporal resolution. Live-cell imaging has led to significant advances in understanding cellular function at the molecular level. Major progress in understanding how biology gets the job done has also come from combining techniques from genetics and physiology, such as silencing a gene to shut down the expression of proteins, or from making perturbations that elucidate specific molecular pathways. The physics and chemistry communities have brought physical insights to biophysics and cell biology. The division of tasks among the different disciplines in molecular and cellular biology essentially ended with the advent of those and other new transdisciplinary approaches. Mathematical physics, or applied mathematics, is slowly shifting its focus from quantum mechanics and the classical mathematics of continuous media to the mathematics of life…
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