Syllabus

Date	Topic
3/8/2026	Bootcamp Introduction + A Feeling for the Numbers in Biology Student lightning talks. Course introduction. Street-Fighting Mathematics; Order-of-magnitude estimates as a tool for discovery in the living world. What sets the scale of X. The cell as a bag of X.
3/9/2026	Stuff(t) and The Protocol of Biological Dynamics Update rules for dynamical systems. Gene expression dynamics. Exploratory dynamics.
3/10/2026	Quantifying Prejudice — The Great Probability Distributions of Biology Constitutive promoters; the Poisson distribution. Diffusion as the null model for biological dynamics; bionomial and Gaussian distributions. Molecular steps; The exponential distribution.
3/11/2026	Vectors and Representations. Representations; Everything is a vector. Finding the right coordinate system; The dance of the eigenworm. The theory of the transcriptome.
3/12/2026	Defiance is the Secret of Life; Burning Energy for Fun and Profit. Entropy maximization and the mathematics of superlatives. Biological batteries. Defying diffusion; Paying for positional information, the cost of gradients. Biological specificity; Kinetic proofreading.
3/13/2026	Physical Biology of the Embryo. Positional Information. Turing patterns. Morphogenesis; Shape and gut buckling.
3/14/2026	Physical Biology of the Embryo. Dimensionless parameters. The protocols of Physical Biology. Presentations of students’ projects. End of course party.