Topic Review: Thinking Quantitatively I: Descriptions and Models

Published by the Nuffield Foundation, the Nuffield Advanced Biology Topic Reviews for students were an integral part of the Advanced Biological Science materials, but each could be read on its own. Thus, students could use them for their current work, or to pursue personal interests.

This topic review illustrated the use of mathematics to describe precisely the characteristics of living things, the processes that occur in their bodies, their numbers, and their relations to each other and their environments. It explained the importance of the use of mathematics in the design of experiments and when analysing the results obtained from them. It also covered the use of mathematics to build up models of living processes to serve as hypotheses on which investigations could be based.

Contents
*Qualitative and quantitative observations
*Variables
*Measurement
*Error
*Using graphs to describe data
*Graphs and hypotheses
*Models and hypotheses
*Probabilistic models in genetics