The 'official course' description gives a long list of possible pre-requisites. However,
it is very possible that you really don't need all of these pre-requisites to do well in my
course. Below I outline what I think a student needs as background. If, after reading this material,
you think that this is the course for you (and your advisor is concerned) e-mail me:
jmilton@jsd.claremont.edu ; or better still drop by and visit. Quite likely you will be able to take the
course - after-all it could change your whole life!


Students:

The essential requirements for this course is that the student is 'comfortable' thinking about problems
quantitatively and interested in thinking about issues in human physiology from this perspective. Enthusiasm
is a big plus. If you are terrified about using mathematics and computers, then this course is likely not
for you!

Mathematics:

I believe that you can understand dynamical aspects of physiology by only knowing how to do derivatives,
a Taylor's series expansion, and the determinant of a 2 x 2 matrix. Don't worry about the last two items
since we will take about 5 minutes in class to learn how to do this. The reason that you don't need many
years of mathematics to take this course is that most problems of interest in biology cannot be solved with
paper and pencil and typically are studied using a computer as a laboratory tool. Thus skill in
manipulating concepts and ideas become more important that technical skills in manipulating numbers on paper.
Of course it's also great if you have lots of mathematics, particularly applied mathematics. All said and done,
this course will be easiest if you have done a course in calculus.


Computers:

The laboratory tool we use in this course is the computer. In particular we are going to use only
software packages that are both widely used for research and that are downloadable for free from the
Internet. Thus at the very least you need to know how to search the Internet (using, for example, google).
Some programming experience will be useful, but note that in this course we are going to introduce to
a computer language that is rapidly becoming the 'scientific computing language', namely PYTHON. For personal
computing requirements see Computers

Physiology:

An introductory course in biology, or physiology, is helpful; however, the biology part of this course
is self-contained. Thus math, computers, and interest out-weigh an extensive background in physiology.