1 Some basic neurophysiology 4 The neuron 1. 1 4 1. 1. 1 The axon 7 1. 1. 2 The synapse 9 12 1. 1. 3 The soma 1. 1. 4 The dendrites 13 13 1. 2 Types of neurons 2 Signals in the nervous system 14 2. 1 Action potentials as point events - point processes in the nervous system 15 18 2. 2 Spontaneous activi~ in neurons 3 Stochastic modelling of single neuron spike trains 19 3. 1 Characteristics of a neuron spike train 19 3. 2 The mathematical neuron 23 4 Superposition models 26 4. 1 superposition of renewal processes 26 4. 2 Superposition of stationary point processe- limiting behaviour 34 4. 2. 1...

This volume is the issue of the symposium 'Theoretical Approaches to Complex systems', held in Tlibingen on June 11 and 12, 1977. The meeting was dedicated to the late Ernst Pfaffelhuber of the Institute for Information Sciences, University of Tlibingen, in memory of his con- tributions to information theory, physics, and biology and of his many fruitful contacts with the Tlibingen scientists gathered on this occa- sion. We would like to express our gratitude to all participants for their willingness to offer a weekend, for their help and the care they took in writing a contribution to this...

This is the part of any book where the authors usually discuss why they wrote it. We hope, however, that the text will justifY itself. In fact, any well-trained ecologist will immediately grasp the significance of these seminal works. We have therefore tried to keep our interpretive comments to a minimum. Students of "modern" theoretical ecology will want to contrast the papers in this collection with their modern derivatives. We believe that those who do so will be surprised, if not amazed, by the ecological sophistication and intellectual power of the earlier works. They will stand as a...

This volume is an investigation of interspecific competition for space, particularly among sessile organisms, both plant and animal, and its consequences for community structure. While my own contribu- tion ----and the bulk of this volume --- lies in mathematical analysis of the phenomenon, I have also tried to summarize the most important natural historical aspects of these communities, and have devoted much effort to relating the mathematical results to observations of the natural world. Thus, the volume has both a synthetic and an analytic aspect. On the one hand, I have been struck by...

This volume consists of a selection of papers presented at a 'Symposium on Mathematical Modelling in Biology and Ecology', held at the Conference Centre of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa on July 5 and 6, 1979. The Symposium was organized by the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences of the CSIR, the National Institute of Virology, the University of the Witwaters= rand and the South African Journal of Science. The primary reason for the symposium was to provide a forum for South African researchers in the fields of Mathematical...

The idea of organizing a symposium on mathematical models in biology came to some colleagues, members of the Accademia dei Lincei, in order to point out the importance of mathematics not only for supplying instruments for the elaboration and the evaluation of experimental data, but also for discussing the possibility of developing mathematical formulations of biological problems. This appeared particularly appropriate for genetics, where mathematical models have been of historical importance. When the organizing work had started, it became clear to us that the classic studies of Vito Volterra...

The mathematical models in this book are concerned with a variety of approaches to the manner in which the clinical radiologic treatment of human neoplasms can be improved. These improvements comprise ways of delivering radiation to the malignan cies so as to create considerable damage to tumor cells while sparing neighboring normal tissues. There is no unique way of dealing with these improvements. Accord ingly, in this book a number of different presentations are given. Each presentation has as its goal some aspect of the improvement, or optimization, of radiotherapy. This book is a...

The papers in this volume are based on talks given at a one day conference held on the campus of Adelphi University in April 1982. The conference was organized with the title "Oscillations in Mathematical Biology;" however the speakers were allowed considerable latitutde in their choice of topics. In the event, the talks all concerned the dynamics of non-linear systems arising in biology so that the conference achieved a good measure of cohesion. Some of the speakers cho~e not to submit a manuscript for these proceedings, feeling that their material was too conjectural to be committed to...

Increasingly, mathematical methods are being used to advantage in addressing the problems facing humanity in managing its environment. Problems in resource management and epidemiology especially have demonstrated the utility of quantitative modeling. To explore these approaches, the Center of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University organized a conference in Fall, 1987, with the objective of surveying and assessing the state of the art. This volume records the proceedings of that conference. Underlying virtually all of these studies are models of population growth, from individual cells to...