This book provides a self-study program on how mathematics, computer science and science can be usefully and seamlessly intertwined. Learning to use ideas from mathematics and computation is essential for understanding approaches to cognitive and biological science. As such the book covers calculus on one variable and two variables and works through a number of interesting first-order ODE models. It clearly uses MatLab in computational exercises where the models cannot be solved by hand, and also helps readers to understand that approximations cause errors - a fact that must always be kept in mind.

BioInformation Processing

by James K. Peterson

Published 11 December 2018
This book shows how mathematics, computer science and science can be usefully and seamlessly intertwined. It begins with a general model of cognitive processes in a network of computational nodes, such as neurons, using a variety of tools from mathematics, computational science and neurobiology. It then moves on to solve the diffusion model from a low-level random walk point of view. It also demonstrates how this idea can be used in a new approach to solving the cable equation, in order to better understand the neural computation approximations. It introduces specialized data for emotional content, which allows a brain model to be built using MatLab tools, and also highlights a simple model of cognitive dysfunction.