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Or buy a copy
- E-book ($9.95): Buy on Leanpub
- Print edition: Buy on Amazon
Why the book?
The free course on this website is comprehensive — but it’s also large, full of software tutorials, and built for screen-by-screen reading. The book offers something different:
- One clean narrative. Each chapter poses a single compelling biological question and answers it through mathematical modeling — no sidebars, no installation guides, just the story.
- Read anywhere. The e-book works offline on any device. The print edition travels with you.
- A reference you can search, highlight, and annotate. Much easier to revisit than a website spread across dozens of pages.
- Beautiful figures. Every illustration from the course, laid out for the page in full color.
- Support free education. Your purchase helps keep this course free for everyone.
What’s inside
Biological Modeling: A Short Tour follows the conceptual core of the course across five chapters:
- Prologue — Why do zebras have stripes? We model Turing patterns emerging from reaction-diffusion systems.
- Module 1 — How do cells regulate their own genes? We explore transcription factor networks and the motifs that evolution has discovered.
- Module 2 — How does a single-celled bacterium navigate its world intelligently? We decode E. coli’s chemotaxis algorithm.
- Module 3 — Why did SARS-CoV-2 spread so much more effectively than the original SARS? We compare coronavirus spike proteins using structural biology and molecular dynamics.
- Module 4 — How can computers be trained to see as well as a human? We build a classifier for white blood cell images using machine learning.
Each chapter is co-authored with talented Carnegie Mellon University students who helped build the Biological Modeling project.
Backed by hundreds of supporters
Publication of Biological Modeling: A Short Tour was funded by several hundred backers through Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We are grateful to every supporter who helped bring the book to life.
