Infobiotics. Information in biotic systems (Q1944679)

Infobiotics is the reverse side of bioinformatics according to the author: ``In bioinformatics the biologists ask computer scientists to assist them in elaborating the data they obtain. Conversly, in infobiotics computer scientists and mathematicians provide biologists with explanations and theories which biologists need to verify by means of specific experiments.'' The book is divided into two parts, ``Topics in discrete biomathematics'' and ``Discrete mathematical backgrounds''. The themes in the first part cover discrete information and life, where sets, sequences, trees and graphs are introduced as fundamental organization of biological components, strings and genomes, where basic concepts about DNA molecules and genomes are presented, algorithms and biorythms, aiming at showing the the links between the concepts of algorithm and biorythm starting with metabolism, and finally life strategies, where some basic strategies of life are outlined looking at life as based on complex systems interacting with the environment. The second part of the book is an overview of a mixture of discrete mathematics, computing, probability, and statistics. Some topics are: numbers and measures, including set theory, induction and recurrence, series and growths, and discrete dynamical systems, language and grammars, with strings, regular expressions, patterns, Turing machine, and entropy, and finally combinations and chances, discussing factorials and binomial coefficients, distributions and discrete probability, allocations and partitions, Stirling, Bell, Catalan, and Bernoulli numbers, statistical tests, least squares, trees and graphs.