Did you ever wonder what type of mathematics is used in Mathematical Biology? Wonder no more. The Circos plot below shows the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) reported in published articles during a 5-year period in two leading journals in mathematical biology that require this information for submission. The MSC is a system used by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) to categorize items covered by the mathematical literature.

The results using the 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification are:

• Nearly all areas of mathematics are represented.
• The top 10 dominant areas are:
  • 92: Biology and other natural sciences,
  • 34: Ordinary differential equations,
  • 60: Probability theory and stochastic processes,
  • 62: Statistics,
  • 37: Dynamical systems and ergodic theory,
  • 49: Calculus of variations and optimal control; optimization,
  • 43: Abstract harmonic analysis,
  • 58: Global analysis, analysis on manifolds,
  • 93: Systems theory; control,
  • 80: Classical thermodynamics, heat transfer.

Is there anything missing in the list? Yes!

We have a multidisciplinary corpus rooted in tradition. However, that tradition has been upended by the fast development of data availability and AI in the last few years. We went from data paucity to data explosion in a blink (in academic years, that is), and methods have not caught up yet. We have solutions that emerge in niches and tend to propagate organically; this is (many times) effective (but not always) but it is not efficient. The bar to enter the field is too high… or low without foundational knowledge. The latter results in superficial capabilities. Therefore, it might be time to think deeper into what the corpus and the training could look like, and it might not be simply the addition of competencies by discipline. This might sound abstract, but we now have examples.  The new science of data is emerging in this landscape as something that surpasses the capabilities of other fields of knowledge established in the past.

We are not collecting data related to data science in the mathematical sciences. As usual, the most important information might be in the data gap.

About Circos

A Circos plot is a visualization tool used primarily for understanding and interpreting data in a circular layout, often employed in genomic research. This type of plot is commonly used for displaying relationships between pairs of data points in a circular format, which can be easier to interpret and more visually striking than linear representations. It can also be used for large linear or tree-like data sets that are difficult to visualize otherwise.