PREFACE
“If the 20th century belonged to physics, the 21st century may well belong to biology. Just 50 years after the discovery of DNA's chemical structure and the invention of the computer experiment, a revolution is occurring in biology, driven by mathematical and computational science.”
Jim Austin, US editor of Science, and Carlos Castillo-Chavez, professor of biomathematics, Science, February 6, 2004
Calculus was invented in the second half of the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz to solve problems in physics and geometry. Calculus heralded in the “age of physics” with many of the advances in mathematics over the past 300 years going hand-in-hand with the development of various fields of physics, such as mechanics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. Today, physics and some branches of mathematics are obligate mutualists: unable to exist without one another. The history of the growth of this obligate association is evident in the types of problems that pervade modern calculus textbooks and contribute to the canonical lower division mathematics curricula offered at educational institutions around the world.
The “age of biology” is most readily identified with two seminal events: the publication of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species, in 1859; and, almost 100 years later, Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery in 1953 of the genetic code. About mathematics, Darwin stated
“I have deeply regretted that I ...
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