The contemplation and resolution of questions at the interfaces of biology, mathematics, and physics promise to lead to a greater understanding of the natural world and to open new avenues for physics. The choice of questions in this article, most of them related to the statistical behavior of biological systems, reflects my own research interests. But it also reflects my belief that some of the unresolved issues in the mathematics of biology are related to the diversity, randomness, variation, and correlations in biology. With luck, physics-based approaches may shed further light on those issues.
The mathematical focus of the research questions I propose complements the public-health focus of the 14 Grand Challenges in Global Health announced in October 2003. 1 Those challenges have realigned health-related research priorities—not only those of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which initiated the identification of the challenges, but also those of other public and...