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> Most biologists tend to take very little math Wow, really? That's surprising to me. The hardest course I ever took was one I took for my MSCS in bioinforma
by commandlinefan 7y ago
> Most biologists tend to take very little math
Wow, really? That's surprising to me. The hardest course I ever took was one I took for my MSCS in bioinformatics. It seemed very math-heavy, and math-heavy in ways that I couldn't lean on my past experience to "muscle" my way through.
- adenadel 7y agoIn my experience, a lot of biologists learning bioinformatics/genomics tend to learn a specific set of general tools (HMMs, multiple hypothesis testing, PCA, etc.) and then learn some specific statistical tools that apply to their data (e.g negative binomial GLMs for RNAseq).
- ncmncm 7y agoThere is enormous room for original, fundamental, groundbreaking work here.
- najarvg 7y agoBoth you and the OP are right in your own ways. It's worth remembering that bioinformatics, computational biology and other inter-disciplinary fields like these (mathematical oncology comes to mind) are relatively new and the proportion of biological sciences graduates doing these are dwarfed by the number that go through a "conventional" (as probably alluded to by the OP) biological sciences curriculum. Mathematical modeling in biological sciences is incredibly hard because of the sheer complexity in the many layers that comprise our knowledge of biology (cell layer. molecular biology layer, tissue layer etc) and I generally agree with the sentiment that more investments in research at the math-biology intersection will further our ability to understand biology better.