BIOCOMPUTATION: some history and prospects.

At first glance, biology and computer science are diametrically opposed sciences. Biology deals with carbon based life forms shaped by evolution and natural selection. Computer Science deals with electronic machines designed by engineers and guided by mathematical algorithms.

The mathematical biophysics of Nicolas Rashevsky.

N. Rashevsky (1899-1972) was one of the pioneers in the application of mathematics to biology. With the slogan: mathematical biophysics : biology :: mathematical physics ; physics, he proposed the creation of a quantitative theoretical biology.

Population models: stability in one dimension.

Some of the simplest models of population growth are one dimensional nonlinear difference equations. While such models can display wild behavior including chaos, the standard biological models have the interesting property that they display global stability if they display local stability. Various researchers have sought a simple explanation for this agreement of local and global stability.

Walking tree heuristics for comparative genomic alignments.

Genomic sequence data is available for an ever-increasing number of organisms, but the full meaning of this data remains an enigma. String alignment is one approach for deciphering the information contained in genetic strings. Sequences which are conserved across species will help identify genes and other important structures.