Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart - review  A timely account of
why biologists and mathematicians are hooking up at last   • The
Guardian,   • Jump to comments () Dairy cow Dairy cows are not,
on the whole, spherical. Photograph: John Mason/SWNS.COM  Did
you hear about the farmer who hired some mathematicians to help
him increase his milk yield? Their report began: "Consider a
spherical cow . . . "    1. Mathematics of Life: Unlocking the
Secrets of Existence   2. by Ian Stewart  This is a famous old
joke about the disconnect between mathematics, the language of
clear abstractions, and the life sciences, the domain of messy
organic forms. For much of the history of science, biology and
maths have barely been on speaking terms. When I was at school,
biology was the science you took precisely to avoid calculations
and formulae. Maths was firmly in bed with physics, its muse.
Ian Stewart says this is changing. He claims that for the next
century the driving force behind mathematics will be biology,
and that th