Class
meets: Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:40-3:00,
at: SEC-211 (Busch Campus)
link to sakai website:
announcements, grades, blog, chats, and additional information accessible from there.
Text:
Online lecture notes (see link below).
You do not need to purchase any textbook (please ignore whatever contrary
information you have seen).
Instructor:
Eduardo Sontag,
email:
sontag@math (add .rutgers.edu if
mailing from outside Rutgers)
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30-1:30,
724 Hill
Center - but you should let me know in advance, by email or talking to me after
class, if you will be coming in - also any other mutually convenient times, by appointment, and
"24/7" communication by email.
Please add the following word: ALLOW336 (no spaces) to the subject line of any email sent to the instructor
Final
Exam: 20 Dec, 12:00PM-3:00PM (tentative, to be confirmed.)
Important notices will be sent to you by email, to the address which the registrar provides for you (typically in the "eden" machine). You should set "forwarding" from that address if you wish to receive your emails in some other service (yahoo, gmail, etc).
Instructor's lecture notes
(it is suggested that you do not print out all the problem sets until needed,
since they will be continuously updated)
Syllabus and homework assignments
An introduction to molecular systems biology (optional but strongly recommended reading)
Review notes on differential equations
(make sure that you know this material!)
Note: The course assumes familiarity with differential equations
(its prerequisites are Calc4 and Linear Algebra).
This last set of readings
includes review notes on differential equations
which may help refresh your mind, as well as a set of problems.
This is review material. If you have difficulty
working out the problems, perhaps you should not take this course.
To help you with MATLAB, here is one file:
odesolution_example.m
Download it into a directory in the MATLAB path, and execute it by typing
odesolution_example in MATLAB.
Edit it as needed (the example is a Van der Pol oscillator).
An interactive plotter is here:
odem.m
(Copyright 2009, Gabriel Alcantara).
Download it into a directory in the MATLAB path, and execute it by typing
odem in MATLAB.
Edit it as needed (the example is a Van der Pol oscillator).
| Class attendance is mandatory. There will be no make-ups for quizzes or exams. |
Noteworthy quotes:
"Complex assemblies of interacting proteins carry out most of the interesting jobs in a cell, such as metabolism, DNA synthesis, movement and information processing. These physiological properties play out as a subtle molecular dance, choreographed by underlying regulatory networks. To understand this dance, a new breed of theoretical molecular biologists reproduces these networks in computers and in the mathematical language of dynamical systems." (From "Network dynamics and cell physiology", by Tyson, Chen, and Novak, Nature Reviews in Molecular Cell Biology, 2001.)
"The slippery gooiness of biology is a consequence of its incredible complexity, consisting as it does of complex systems based upon chemistry. And chemistry obeys the rules of physics, which exists because of, and is consequently best described by, mathematics." (From the Mathematics in Biology page at Brandeis.)
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. (By Sir William Bragg, Physics Nobel Prize for X-ray crystallography.)
... mathematics ... was repugnant to me ... from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra... This impatience was very foolish ... I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense. (From Charles Darwin's Autobiography, 1876.)
biomath major
at Rutgers
Mathematical
Biology web sites
back to Eduardo Sontag's Web page