The famous geneticist James Watson, of the double helix fame, about his relations with mathematics:<\/p>\n
All through my undergraduate days I worried that my limited mathematical talents might keep me from being more than a naturalist.\u00a0 In deciding to go for the gene, whose essence was surely in its molecular properties, there seemed no choice but to tackle my weakness head-on.\u00a0 Not only was math at the heart of virtually all physics, but the forces at work in three-dimensional ;molecular structures could not be described except with math. Only by taking\u00a0 higher math courses would I develop sufficient comfort to work at the leading edge of my field, even if I never got near the leading edge of math.\u00a0 And so my Bs in two genuinely tough math courses were worth far more in confidence capital than any\u00a0 \u00a0I would likely have received in a biology course, no matter ;how demanding.\u00a0 Though I would never use the full extent of the analytical methods I had learned, the Poisson distribution analyses needed to do most phage experiments soon became satisfying instead of a source of crippling anxiety. [From J. D. Watson, Avoid Boring People<\/em> , Vintage Books, New York, 2010, p. 51]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The famous geneticist James Watson, of the double helix fame, about his relations with mathematics: All through my undergraduate days I worried that my limited mathematical talents might keep me from being more than a naturalist.\u00a0 In deciding to go for the gene, whose essence was surely in its molecular properties, there seemed no choice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borovik.net\/selecta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}