FROM GENETICS TO MATHEMATICS

This volume contains pedagogical and elementary introductions to genetics for mathematicians and physicists as well as to mathematical models and techniques of population dynamics. It also offers a physicist's perspective on modeling biological processes.Each chapter starts with an overview followed by the recent results obtained by authors. Lectures are self-contained and are devoted to various phenomena such as the evolution of the genetic code and genomes, age-structured populations, demography, sympatric speciation, the Penna model, Lotka-Volterra and other predator-prey models, evolutionary models of ecosystems, extinctions of species, and the origin and development of language. Authors analyze their models from the computational and mathematical points of view.