“Randomness in Biology” is a graduate-level course offered at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore by Dr. Mukund Thattai.

This course follows, in spirit, Handbook of Stochastic Methods: For Physics, Chemistry, and the Natural Sciences by Gardiner and Stochastic Processes in Physics and Chemistry by Van Kampen. It offers a bag full of stochastic tools to biologists for modeling and describing experiments and hypotheses. The course is not intended to be mathematically rigorous, but remains very faithful to the spirit of rigor. The instructor strikes a balance between rigor and intuition really well.

The course focused on different types of Random Walk: discrete-time discrete-step, discrete-time continuous-step, and continuous-time and continuous steps; as well as Master equations, which can describe almost all of the chemistry. Stochastic differential equations and Fokker-Plank equations were also discussed. We conducted simulations using Langevin equations and Gillespie algorithms.

The assignments were pleasant to solve and they required good knowledge of some languages: MATLAB, Mathematica, Python, etc.

The instructor is full of energy and knows his subject very well. His ability to quickly switch gears and make connections is impressive. He is able to quickly understand questions asked and explain the fundamentals clearly. What is more important, he is not lazy when it comes to working out derivations and equations. It is a pleasure to watch him in action.

The classroom Safeda, named after a mango variety, deserves as much praise as the instructor for its spacious whiteboard. To sum up, it is a great course for anyone with a passable background in mathematics. For an engineer who had little exposure to stochastic processes, it was a joyful and enlightening experience, which the instructor did not ruin by setting up unreasonably difficult and routine examinations.

Updated On: January 26, 2023