Evolgen has an interesting post about going to a math department seminar where the topic was genomics. He goes over some questions mathematicians had about biology and their misconceptions. I don't know...I talked to a woman this January who has an undergraduate math degree, and she told her boyfriend (a friend of mine) that she was surprised that biology could be interesting!
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I attended a seminar in the Math Department today. The topic was assembling genomes. Even though this is a computationally rigorous field, the speaker glazed over all the mathematically interesting details. Maybe he thought the mathematicians in the audience would be bored by the math. Because…
In honor of Mother's Day, I want to celebrate the ways that mothers have blazed trails, knocked down barriers, and challenged expectations of what their daughters' lives can be.
When we're young, we don't always appreciate how important our parents (or other adults in our circle) can be as role…
Three for the price of one in this week's Friday Bookshelf! Which maybe makes up a little for the complete lack of a Friday Bookshelf last week.
First up is Lynn M. Osen's classic, originally published in 1974 and simply titled Women in Mathematics. Osen's slim volume has been beloved - and…
It's Women's History Month, and the Diversity in Science Carnival has asked us to profile women scientists. I spend a lot of time thing about the things that affect the lives of today's young women scientists, but I also know that we are preceded by some incredibly strong and brave women who faced…
Speaking as a maths student myself, what always put me off biology was the fact that all we did in secondary school was memorise heaps of facts and regurgitate them on demand. To a mathematician, that's extremely boring - we generally prefer to boil a vast array of facts down to a few key rules, and thus tend to loathe endless memorisation.
Ironically, getting involved in the whole creationism/evolution debate thing has got me a lot more interested. Having read up on evolution, I now feel like biology has some sort of logic behind it, which wasn't an impression I'd ever got before. With a bit of luck (and a bit less blog-browsing), I'll hopefully get the grades necessary to take a computational biology MPhil - fingers crossed!
yes, biology is taught as a "stamp collecting" science. in my high school part of this was due to the evolution-creationism debate, my bio teacher told me privately he focused on anatomy to avoid getting blasted by creationist parents.
Well, I went to college originally to study Genetics, not having taken any Biology courses in High School, but Physics, Chemistry and Math. I was taken aback with all the prep work needed to start doing anything interesting - like preparing slides and dying stuff, and fiddling around with various solutions.
On the other hand computers and programming offered an immediate mental hit - as you just have to switch them on and you're in the thick of problem solving quickly.
For me solving puzzles of any kind are addictive, and that plus the fact that I'm impatient, drive me away from Biology to Comp Sci.