Mathematical Macroevolution in Diatom Research

Buy this book to learn how to use mathematics in macroevolution research and apply mathematics to study complex biological problems.

This book contains recent research in mathematical and analytical studies on diatoms. These studies reflect the complex and intricate nature of the problems being analyzed and the need to use mathematics as an aid in finding solutions. Diatoms are important components of marine food webs, the silica and carbon cycles, primary productivity, and carbon sequestration. Their uniqueness as glass-encased unicells and their presence throughout geologic history exemplifies the need to better understand such organisms. Explicating the role of diatoms in the biological world is no more urgent than their role as environmental and climate indicators, and as such, is aided by the mathematical studies in this book.

The volume contains twelve original research papers as chapters. Macroevolutionary science topics covered are morphological analysis, morphospace analysis, adaptation, food web dynamics, origination-extinction and diversity, biogeography, life cycle dynamics, complexity, symmetry, and evolvability. Mathematics used in the chapters include stochastic and delay differential and partial differential equations, differential geometry, probability theory, ergodic theory, group theory, knot theory, statistical distributions, chaos theory, and combinatorics. Applied sciences used in the chapters include networks, machine learning, robotics, computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, and dynamical systems. The volume covers a diverse range of mathematical treatments of topics in diatom research.

Audience

Diatom researchers, mathematical biologists, evolutionary and macroevolutionary biologists, paleontologists, paleobiologists, theoretical biologists, as well as researchers in applied mathematics, algorithm sciences, complex systems science, computational sciences, informatics, computer vision and image processing sciences, nanoscience, the biofuels industry, and applied engineering.

Janice L. Pappas has BA, BS and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan and a MA degree from Drake University. She is a mathematical biologist researching diatoms and invertebrates. She is a Great Lakes aquatic ecologist with studies on-board research vessels and in the lab, resulting in computational analyses of fish distributions in coastal wetlands and ecological informatics analysis of phytoplankton seasonal succession. Other studies include applications to diatom studies using Morse theory and morphospace dynamics, fuzzy measures in systematics, vector spaces in ecological analysis, information theory and Hamiltonian mechanics in morphogenesis, optimization, group and probability theory in macroevolutionary processes, and applied computer vision techniques in diatom imaging studies.

Richard Gordon’s involvement with diatoms goes back to 1970 with his capillarity model for their gliding motility, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. He later worked on a diffusion-limited aggregation model for diatom morphogenesis, which led to the first paper ever published on diatom nanotechnology in 1988. He organized the first workshop on diatom nanotech in 2003. His other research is on computed tomography algorithms, HIV/AIDS prevention, and embryogenesis. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gordon_ (theoretical_biologist).

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