Introductory Science and Mathematics Education for 21st-Century Biologists
Author(s): William Bialek1, David Botstein2
1. Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA., Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. 2. Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA., Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
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Description
Galileo wrote that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”; his quantitative approach to understanding the natural world arguably marks the beginning of modern science. Nearly 400 years later, the fragmented teaching of science in our universities still leaves biology outside the quantitative and mathematical culture that has come to define the physical sciences and engineering. This strikes us as particularly inopportune at a time when opportunities for quantitative thinking about biological systems are exploding. We propose that a way out of this dilemma is a unified introductory science curriculum that fully incorporates mathematics and quantitative thinking.
Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
- Bialek, W., Botstein, D. (2018). Introductory Science and Mathematics Education for 21st-Century Biologists. QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/Q48F09