The massive research effort known as the Human Genome Project is an attempt to record the sequence of the three trillion nucleotides that make up the human genome and to identify individual genes within this sequence. The description and classification of sequences is heavily dependent on mathematical and statistical models. This short textbook presents a brief description of several ways in which mathematics and statistics are being used in genome analysis and sequencing.

It is not a large overstatement to claim that mathematics has traditionally arisen from attempts to understand quite concrete events in the physical world. The accelerated sophistication of the mathematical community has perhaps obscured this fact, especially during the present century, with the abstract becoming the hallmark of much of respectable mathematics. As a result of the inaccessibility of such work, practicing scientists have often been compelled to fashion their own mathematical tools, blissfully unaware of their prior existence in far too elegant and far too general form. But the...