The Great Math Challenge in Biology Contest, sponsored by the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, the Department of Molecular Biosciences, and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, asked contestants to take a real-world problem in biology and propose a specific advance in pure mathematics that could be used to help solve the problem.
The winners are:
- First Place: DeVon Ingram, University of Chicago
- Second Place: Daniel Fletcher, Northwestern University
- Third Place: Christian Gorski, Northwestern University
Read more about their winning proposals here.
“Historically, biology has inspired new mathematics, from Maxwell to Turing. In turn, breakthroughs in mathematics have generated new insights in biology. The sheer complexity of living beings lends itself to exploration of fields such as topology, complex geometry, dynamical systems, and probability theory.” – The NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology