Question: why do you use maths to investigate cells?

Rob Stanley answered on 23 Jun 2016:

Hi both!

It’s another way of trying to understand how they work. I build ‘models’ to try and predict what they’ll do in different circumstances (like in disease). This is exactly like how they build models to predict the weather.

Using maths is much cheaper than doing lots of experiments (chemicals and tools are expensive!), and it can lead to different ways of thinking about the same problem.