Timeline for How is calculus helpful for biology majors?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 7, 2014 at 15:20 | comment | added | Benoît Kloeckner | @MattF.: this course, especially the idealized version I presented here, is indeed ambitious. However the current calculus level of academic biologists should not be taken as the target for students, but as something that needs to be improved in the future. | |
| May 7, 2014 at 15:17 | comment | added | Benoît Kloeckner | @BenCrowell: in the model of cell motion, $d$ is indeed the root-mean-square distance. Any model involving a reasonably simple relation between variables would work here: calculus is used mostly to deal with uncertainties, and to discuss change of variables and log-log plots. | |
| May 6, 2014 at 1:24 | comment | added | user173 | It looks like a great course, though ambitious for first-year students. (The U.S. has plenty of students unable to deal with exponentials too.) A student who understands even the half of your syllabus before differential equations may be more mathematically sophisticated than most academic biologists. | |
| May 5, 2014 at 3:14 | comment | added | user507 | In the model of cell motion, is $d$ the average of the magnitude of the displacement? The root-mean-square distance? I would be interested in seeing this worked out in more detail. It's not obvious to me how to apply calculus to this example, since the derivative $dd/dT$ can't be interpreted as a velocity except perhaps in the case $\beta=1$. | |
| Apr 30, 2014 at 21:12 | history | answered | Benoît Kloeckner | CC BY-SA 3.0 |