Abstract
The life sciences, in particular molecular biology and medicine, have witnessed fundamental progress since the discovery of “the Double Helix”. A relevant part of such an incredible advancement in knowledge has been possible thanks to synergies with the mathematical sciences, on the one hand, and computer science, on the other. Here we review some of the most relevant aspects of this cooperation, focusing on contributions given by the design, analysis and engineering of fast algorithms for the life sciences.
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Notes
- 1.
Dawkins [25].
- 2.
Hood and Galas [61].
- 3.
Gregory John Chaitin is a well-known mathematician. When he came up with the idea and corresponding research on Algorithmic Information Theory he was only 18 years old and had just graduated from CUNY (City College, New York).
- 4.
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century and perhaps that is the reason why this complexity measure carries his name.
- 5.
Claude Shannon is the founder of a mathematical theory of communication that has taken the name of Information Theory. This theory was born after World War II for a project regarding telecommunications networks, but it has had a very wide set of applications also in other fields.
- 6.
The term partition refers to a decomposition of a set of “items” into disjoint subsets, whose union is equal to the entire set.
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Acknowledgements
The author is deeply indebted to Luca Pinello and Filippo Utro for helpful discussions and comments about the content of this chapter. Many thanks also to Margaret Gagie for the usual, very competent proofreading and stylistic comments.
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Giancarlo, R. (2013). Algorithmics for the Life Sciences. In: Ausiello, G., Petreschi, R. (eds) The Power of Algorithms. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39652-6_7
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