BIOS 208: Geometry for biologists

Course Description

This 3-week mini-course offers a short series of lectures and lab workshops to enable researchers working with biological systems to build and play with geometric models of living processes. Lectures will be aimed at getting participants acquainted with fundamentals of differential geometry through examples of biological structures including filaments, membranes, and tissues. We will introduce the framework of discrete differential geometry with focus on numerically simulating differential equations describing curved geometries. Lab workshops will be aimed at playing with toy problems that utilize available open-source tools. Basic understanding of calculus, and differential equations, and some coding experience would be useful.