Answering some mathematical questions

May 23, 2007

Keith Robison started this and Sandra answers the following questions

1. Are you a biologist, if so what kind?
2. What math did you take in college?
3. What math do you use?
4. What math do you wish you’d studied?
5. How do you use math in your job (or research)?

(Note: I still can’t call it “math”. It will always be “maths”)

Onto the answers

1. These days I am outside looking in, but I am a trained physical chemist, with the bulk of my research done on protein structure, dynamics and photophysics, so I consider myself a biophysicist/structural biologist

2. Going to school in India, by the time I got into college, I had a pretty thorough grounding in trigonometry, probability, algebra and calculus. In college just more advanced versions, especially calculus. Only a little formal statistics. That was mostly self taught

3. Pretty much all my calculus, algebra and probability. As a physical chemist, you don’t really have a choice.

4. More statistics and discrete mathematics

5. In graduate school, most of my research was quantum chemistry and molecular simulation, so lots of calculus, probability, and algebra. Since then, algebra, statistics, and probability. These have been applied for bioinformatics (hypothesis testing, etc), algorithm development (mostly in bioinformatics) and for doing a lot of free energy calculation , and these days lots of business modeling.

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