Abstract
In 1864, Waage and Guldberg formulated the “law of mass action.” Since that time, chemists, chemical engineers, physicists and mathematicians have amassed a great deal of knowledge on the topic. In our view, sufficient understanding has been acquired to warrant a formal mathematical consolidation. A major goal of this consolidation is to solidify the mathematical foundations of mass action chemistry—to provide precise definitions, elucidate what can now be proved, and indicate what is only conjectured. In addition, we believe that the law of mass action is of intrinsic mathematical interest and should be made available in a form that might transcend its application to chemistry alone. We present the law of mass action in the context of a dynamical theory of sets of binomials over the complex numbers.
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Acknowledgments
This work benefitted from discussions with many people, named here in alphabetical order: Yuliy Baryshnikov, Yuriy Brun, Qi Cheng, Ed Coffman, Ashish Goel, Jack Hale, Lila Kari, David Kempe, Eric Klavins, John Reif, Paul Rothemund, Robert Sacker, Rolfe Schmidt, Bilal Shaw, David Soloveichik, Hal Wasserman, Erik Winfree.
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Adleman, L., Gopalkrishnan, M., Huang, MD., Moisset, P., Reishus, D. (2014). On the Mathematics of the Law of Mass Action. In: Kulkarni, V., Stan, GB., Raman, K. (eds) A Systems Theoretic Approach to Systems and Synthetic Biology I: Models and System Characterizations. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9041-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9041-3_1
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