Professor: Paul Ginsparg (325 Clark Hall, 5-7371, ginsparg@physics.cornell.edu)
Lectures: Tue/Thu 2:55-4:10 PM, Rockefeller 104
Office hours: Mondays 2-3 PM (or by appointment Wed or Fri)
Prerequisite: upper undergraduate sophistication in physics
(plus recommended basic background in chemistry and biology)
Primary Text: P. Nelson, Biological Physics: Energy, Information, Life
(W.H. Freeman, 2003)
Course website: http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/Phys446-546/ (this page)
In recent years, an increasing number of researchers from mathematics, computer science, and the quantitative sciences have been joining biologists in the ongoing revolution in biology. Biological applications of ideas and methods from physics have become increasingly prominent over the past decade, particularly in computational and quantitative biology. This course uses such applications to introduce some of these concepts and tools from physics, with an emphasis on current research areas. The aim is to expose students with a conventional physics training to some of the concepts and interdisciplinary language increasingly important to the modern working scientist.
This course is intended for upper level undergraduates, and also beginning graduate students.
(Advanced graduate students should refer instead to Physics 653.)
This course will introduce physics topics such as random walks, diffusion, brownian motion, transfer matrix approach, statistical mechanics of networks, information, entropy, and free energy; and highlight their applications to such topics as molecular devices, information flow in cells, and physics of macromolecules. Since this is a new course, the precise syllabus can be adapted to the interests and background of the students. Other topics may include allometric scaling laws in biology, physical limits of biochemical signaling, statistics of sequence alignment, interaction networks, phylogenetic trees, neural networks and computation, or others.
Syllabus, Reading List, Problem Sets (Spring '05)
Syllabus from Fall '03 (last updated 5 Dec '03)