Intuition and innumeracy.

The editors of Cell Biology Education requested a perspective on the math that biologists should know. As it happens, Science magazine just provided such perspective, superbly, when it published on Feburary 4 a number of thoughtful articles on math and biology. One, by Bialek and Botstein (2004), describes what would amount to comprehensive curriculum reforms to better integrate mathematics into the teaching of undergraduate biology and biology into the teaching of natural sciences and math. Another, by May (2004), covers some of the dangers practicing biologists face when attempting to use computational methods without a good understanding of the underlying mathematics. Here, I take those two articles as the starting context and raise only a few additional points. I argue that, even for biologists who lack mathematical skills, replacement of what is in some cases near–functional innumeracy with a better intuition about math and computers is possible and that doing so could have significant positive effects. I also make the case that significant gains in biological understanding may come from biologists taking onboard Twentieth-Century formalisms not now part of the canon of undergraduate mathematics.