Mathematics of Life

Book Review: Mathematics of Life

            The book written by Ian Stewart published in the year 2011 under Basic Books, Inc. titled the “Mathematics of Life” is a book that keeps on claiming, “Biology will be the next great mathematical frontier over the next centuries promising huge advances in medicine and agriculture as well as deep understanding of the nature of life itself” and that it will spearhead and hasten a fundamental and exhilarating swing in how the sciences inter-relate.

According to Stewart, the author, his main objective of writing the book is “to show how the techniques and viewpoints of mathematics are helping us to understand not just what life is made from, but how it works, on every scale from molecules to the entire planet – and possibly beyond”.

Apparently, one thing I like about the book is that it is being direct, well not all of it, but I find some of its topics somehow digestible. Among the topics discussed, I am most absorbed with the topic: “Mathematics and Biology” which is the first topic of the book next to preface. In this chapter, Stewart provided five of the six revolutions he claimed have changed the way scientist think about life. The first five revolutions as he had mentioned were: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of the planet’s living creatures by Carl Linnaeus, the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin, the genetics by Gregor Mendel and the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson. Somehow and in some ways, with the same vein, these revolutions shed new light to how life and its processes are being apprehended. What unites them all, is Stewart’s sixth revolution – “Mathematics”. It was discussed on the last part of the book. If I were to exaggerate things, without a doubt, for me this section of the book unchained those barriers that kept my brain from open-mindedly digesting what the author tried to argue. Mathematics is not only about numbers, doing sums as what have taught in schools, there is more to mathematics!!, and those things that we know, are only a small fraction of the its vast enterprise.

 Honestly, I find a few number of the topics discussed in the book, equivocal. On those sections of the book, I did not fully understand what the author is trying to convey to the point that I just found myself merely reading those words written on it. But, considering the interesting topics, I did learn that most of the applications discussed here are to mainstream mathematical biology and that ”the interaction between mathematics and biology is one of the hottest areas of science and definitely, only the future will show just how far it can go.”

The application of mathematics to biology depends on new apparatus, most obviously the computer. Mathematics provides a new point of view, addressing not just the ingredients for life, but the processes that use those ingredients.Lists of ingredients are not enough to understand biology,because what really matters is how those ingredients are used – the processes that they undergo in a living creature. And the best tool we possess for finding out what processes do is mathematics (Stewart 2011).