Galileo could open the book of nature but couldn't read it. He didn't have the language skills. Descartes's analytical geometry wouldn't appear until the end of Galileo's life, and calculus would have to wait for Leibnitz and Newton a generation later.
Louis Gross has a similar problem. While he has vastly more powerful mathematical tools than either Galileo or Newton, the biological world he's trying to understand does not reveal its text nearly so easily as the heavens did in Newton's day. But Gross, the director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), is not looking for a mathematical Rosetta Stone for decoding the language of life.
"Mathematics periodically goes through phases of new ideas that purportedly will revolutionize our understanding of the biological world," Gross says. "A good example is game theory, which had a huge impact in such fields as economics and evolutionary biology but couldn't begin to live up to the hype."
Catastrophe theory, which explains how sudden shifts in phenomena occur, and chaos theory, which shows how simple equations can produce complicated behavior, are other examples of approaches that proponents hoped would produce a paradigm shift in our thinking, he says. "But all of them, in the end, just added to our tool set. No one of them is going to solve everything."
To Gross, mathematics is a set of symbols and associated rules that have amazing power for explaining how the world works. He and his NIMBioS colleagues are using that language to understand phenomena like the effects of fire and water on plant communities in the Everglades and efficient ways to manage feral cats.
"We don't tell anyone what work they should do at NIMBioS," Gross explains, "and we don't solicit particular restricted research projects. Our work is driven by community requests. People tell us what they'd like us to support, our advisory board evaluates those requests, and we set priorities based on the evaluations and funding.
"We are a national research center. We take an integrative view of national needs across the sciences. Our partners and collaborators include the National Science Foundation, the National Park Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Agriculture, and many others."
Of course, NIMBioS isn't just a research center; it's a major education institution, too.
"We have graduate students and post-docs here," Gross says, "and in the first 17 months that we've been operational, we've brought in more than 800 scientists, educators, and policymakers to participate in workshops and various NIMBioS activities."
NIMBioS's education programs reach students at all levels. The Biology in a Box program, for example, has been phenomenally successful in giving K-12 students and teachers a better understanding of the connections between mathematics and biology, Gross says. "Students see that the same kinds of questions come up in both fields. They learn about the unity of science."
Indeed, Gross believes that mathematics and biology will become more unified with physics, chemistry, and other sciences as NIMBioS grows and matures. He sees a day when biology will be truly integrative and mathematical biologists can predict the consequences of long-term global impacts.
"Maybe we won't be able to actually read nature," he says, "but we'll be able to say how nature will respond to alternative management strategies. That's my dream . . . and I hope I'll be around to see it fulfilled."
