Plenary lecture

Day 2 (Wednesday 23 April) @ 10:00 – 10:50

Corina Tarnita (Princeton University)

A delicate tango: the mathematics of spatial self-organization in biology

Sixty-five years ago, Eugene Wigner reflected on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Wigner writes that two main points are the subject of his discourse:

“The first point is that mathematical concepts turn up in entirely unexpected connections. Moreover, they often permit an unexpectedly close and accurate description of the phenomena in these connections. Secondly, just because of this circumstance, and because we do not understand the reasons of their usefulness, we cannot know whether a theory formulated in terms of mathematical concepts is uniquely appropriate.” ¹

In this talk I will engage with these two points as they pertain to the applications of mathematics to biology, and I will focus the discussion on the long history of mathematical modeling of self-organized pattern formation across biological scales. Mathematical models have a rich but complicated history across fields, from the study of animal coat patterns in developmental biology to landscape-scale vegetation patterns in ecology. I will survey and probe their effectiveness and the intricate process that can allow us to evaluate whether a mathematical theory is “uniquely appropriate” in biology.

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cpa.3160130102

Biography

Corina Tarnita joined the Princeton Ecology and Evolutionary Biology faculty in February 2013 after completing her term with the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow in Mathematical Biology (2010–2012). She earned her BA (’06), MA (’08) and PhD (’09) in Mathematics from Harvard University and has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences. Corina’s research focuses on the comparative understanding of complex adaptive systems, from single cells to entire ecosystems and from human social behavior to cultural evolution. She explores how these systems originate, assemble, interact with their environment, and evolve over time. Central to her research is the development of general theoretical frameworks. She combines these frameworks with empirical data to identify and catalog natural patterns and to develop models whose predictions can be tested experimentally.