SUBJECT
Title
Statistical physics of biological systems
Type of instruction
lecture
Level
master
Faculty
Part of degree program
Credits
3
Recommended in
Semester 3
Typically offered in
Autumn semester
Course description
Major topics: introduction to sytems exhibiting scaling, basics of fractal geometry, simple models of growing structures, percolation, self-organized criticality, bacterial colonies (microbiological background, morphological diagram, models of colony growth, synchronization in biology, integrate and fire and the Kuramoto models, networks: models of equilibrium and growing graphs, processes and modules, collective motion: basic phenomena and models, group motion of people
Readings
recommended readings:
- T. Vicsek, ed., "Fluctuations and Scaling in Biology" (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford) 2001
- Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2001