This book is a compendium of chapters for a course on differential equations and their applications in the biological sciences that I developed at Harvard University. The book and the course roughly follow a wonderful book by Edward Beltrami called Mathematics for Dynamic Modeling published by Academic Press, which is a book written for students who already have a reasonably sophisticated mathematics background. This book covers many of the topics in Beltrami's book (and shamelessly borrows some of his examples), but it is designed for life science students who have had only the basics of calculus, which is to say that students should have a good intuitive feel for the meaning of differentiation and integration, and they should be at home integrating and differentiating sines, cosines, powers, and exponential functions. Note that the book is not really aimed at potential applied mathematicians; instead, my goal is to introduce to future experimental biologists some potentially useful tools and modes of thought.

The material here is organized into 28 chapters with accompanying articles from the current (circa late 1990s) biology research literature that illustrates the utility of the mathematics. (A few of the supporting articles come from the geology and earth science literature, geology being a “hobby” of mine.) I have supplied a paragraph or so of commentary about each of the illustrative articles. I don't require students to understand the biology in these articles (goodness knows how little I understand); rather I mean for the articles to make a convincing case that the mathematics from the course is relevant to specific areas of current biological research.