BME 5131 QUANTITATIVE BIOLOGY
This course aims to provide the conceptual framework and mathematical techniques to predict the behavior of complex biological systems from first principles. Complexity will be defined in a hierarchical manner in terms of three orthogonal characteristics: linear/nonlinear, equilibrium/non-equilibrium, and static/time-varying. All categories of problems within the complexity hierarchy will be described intuitively and mathematically before being made manifest as a specific problem in biology. The goal is to foster a deep understanding of what makes different types of collective problems easy or hard and which techniques/properties are generally applicable for a given problem. The examples of biological systems will span length scales from proteins to populations, and operate on timescales from physiological to evolutionary time.