Calculus For The Life Sciences

Based on the best-selling Calculus and Its Applications by Marv Bittinger, this new text is appropriate for a two-semester calculus course for life science majors. With four new chapters and two new co-authors, Calculus for the Life Sciences continues the Bittinger reputation as one of the most student-oriented and clearly written Applied Calculus texts available. The exercises and examples have been substantially updated to include additional relevant life science applications and current topics.

Authored by two distinguished researchers/teachers and an experiences, successful textbook author, Calculus for Life Sciences is a valuable resource for Life Science courses. As life-science departments increase the math requirements for their majors, there is a need for greater mathematic knowledge among students. This text balances rigorous mathematical training with extensive modeling of biological problems. The biological examples from health science, ecology, microbiology, genetics, and other domains, many based on cited data, are key features of this text.

Mathematics has played a major role in breakthroughs in epidemiology, genetics, physiology, and other biological areas. Calculus for the Life Sciences: Modelling the Dynamics of Life provides life science students with a thorough grounding in mathematics while helping them to understand the role mathematics has in biological science.

Calculus for the Life Sciences is an entire reimagining of the standard calculus sequence with the needs of life science students as the fundamental organizing principle. Those needs, according to the National Academy of Science, include: the mathematical concepts of change, modeling, equilibria and stability, structure of a system, interactions among components, data and measurement, visualization, and algorithms. This book addresses, in a deep and significant way, every concept on that list. The book begins with a primer on modeling in the biological realm and biological modeling is the theme and frame for the entire book. The authors build models of bacterial growth, light penetration through a column of water, and dynamics of a colony of mold in the first few pages. In each case there is actual data that needs fitting. In the case of the mold colony that data is a set of photographs of the colony growing on a ruled sheet of graph paper and the students need to make their own approximations. Fundamental questions about the nature of mathematical modeling—trying to approximate a real-world phenomenon with an equation—are all laid out for the students to wrestle with. The authors have produced a beautifully written introduction to the uses of mathematics in the life sciences. The exposition is crystalline, the problems are overwhelmingly from biology and interesting and rich, and the emphasis on modeling is pervasive. An instructor's manual for this title is available electronically to those instructors who have adopted the textbook for classroom use. Please send email to [email protected] for more information. Online question content and interactive step-by-step tutorials are available for this title in WebAssign. WebAssign is a leading provider of online instructional tools for both faculty and students.

In this much anticipated first edition, the authors present the basic canons of first-year calculus, but motivated through real biological problems. The two main goals of the text are to provide students with a thorough grounding in calculus concepts and applications, analytical techniques, and numerical methods and to have students understand how, when, and why calculus can be used to model biological phenomena.Ê Both students and instructors will find the book to be a gateway to the exciting interface of mathematics and biology.

Calculus for the Life Sciences: Modeling the Dynamics of Life introduces 1st-year life sciences majors to the insights and applications of mathematics in the biological sciences. Designed to help life sciences students understand the role mathematics has played in breakthroughs in epidemiology, genetics, physiology, and other biological areas, this text provides students with a thorough foundation in mathematics, the language, and 'the technology of thought' with which these developments are created and controlled.

Calculus for the Life Sciences features interesting, relevant applications that motivate students and highlight the utility of mathematics for the life sciences. This edition also features new ways to engage students with the material, such as Your Turn exercises. The MyMathLab(r) course for the text provides online homework supported by learning resources such as video tutorials, algebra help, and step-by-step examples.

​ ​​ Mathematics for the Life Sciences provides present and future biologists with the mathematical concepts and tools needed to understand and use mathematical models and read advanced mathematical biology books. It presents mathematics in biological contexts, focusing on the central mathematical ideas, and providing detailed explanations. The author assumes no mathematics background beyond algebra and precalculus. Calculus is presented as a one-chapter primer that is suitable for readers who have not studied the subject before, as well as readers who have taken a calculus course and need a review. This primer is followed by a novel chapter on mathematical modeling that begins with discussions of biological data and the basic principles of modeling. The remainder of the chapter introduces the reader to topics in mechanistic modeling (deriving models from biological assumptions) and empirical modeling (using data to parameterize and select models). The modeling chapter contains a thorough treatment of key ideas and techniques that are often neglected in mathematics books. It also provides the reader with a sophisticated viewpoint and the essential background needed to make full use of the remainder of the book, which includes two chapters on probability and its applications to inferential statistics and three chapters on discrete and continuous dynamical systems. The biological content of the book is self-contained and includes many basic biology topics such as the genetic code, Mendelian genetics, population dynamics, predator-prey relationships, epidemiology, and immunology. The large number of problem sets include some drill problems along with a large number of case studies. The latter are divided into step-by-step problems and sorted into the appropriate section, allowing readers to gradually develop complete investigations from understanding the biological assumptions to a complete analysis.