The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While this article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you gloss over the math.

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Balancing Homeostasis and Health

For SIAM News:

Human beings are not bicycles. However, mechanistic metaphors for the human body abound. For instance, we compare athletes to finely-tuned machines and look for equations that are derived from mechanics to describe biological processes — even when the relationship is no better than an analogy.

However, the concept of homeostasis clearly exemplifies the breakdown of mechanistic models when one applies them to the human body. Homeostasis is the process by which an organism maintains a stable output regardless of input (within reasonable limits). The most familiar example is human body temperature, which stays within a remarkably small range of values regardless of whether one is sitting in a cold room or walking outside on a hot day.

“In a bicycle, you know what each part is for,” Michael Reed, a mathematician at Duke University, said. “We are not machines with fixed parts; we are a large pile of cooperating cells. The question is, how does this pile of cooperating cells accomplish various tasks?”

[ Read the rest at SIAM News ]