Dr. Frank Hoppensteadt, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU, New York, NY
Mathematicians and biologists, including medical scientists, have a long history of working successfully together. Sophisticated mathematical results have been used in and have emerged from the life sciences. Examples are given by the development of stochastic processes and statistical methods to solve a variety of population problems in demography, ecology, genetics and epidemics, and most joint work between biologists, physicists, chemists and engineers involves synthesis and analysis of mathematical structures. Pythagoras, Aristotle, Fibonacci, Cardano, Bernoulli, Euler, Fourier, Laplace, Gauss, von Helmholtz, Riemann, Einstein, Thompson, Turing, Wiener, von Neumann, Thom, and Keller are names associated with both significant applications of mathematics to life science problems and significant developments in mathematics motivated by the life sciences.