Steven Strogatz on Mathematics, Biology and the Value of Simple Models

This is a really inspiring talk given at The NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology in June [2025]. See Arthur Winfree's 1980 book The Geometry of Biological Time.

 

 








See also Anton Petrov on Ultra Weak Biophoton Emission and Time Crystals.

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I'm reposting this, from a year or so ago, because of the Institut Henri Poincaré thing this morning which asked "What kind of knot is a person?" and it really made me think. Especially, it reminded me of this idea of Algebraic Automata theory. I had never heard of that, but it is about as old an idea as Automata theory itself. See Attila Egri-Nagy on a Concatenative Logic Programming Language.  It seems that lots of things, like knot theory and automata theory, for example, are only accidentally in different categories: if history had been otherwise, then maybe we would have sliced it all up quite differently and we would be amazed by theorems relating knots and regular languages instead. See Daniel Tubbenhauer on Upper Bounds for Unknotting Numbers.

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