Computer Science as a Lens on the Sciences: The Example of Computational Molecular Biology

This talk will trace the growing influence of fundamental ideas from computer science on the nature of research in a number of scientific fields. There is a growing awareness that information processing lies at the heart of the processes studied in fields as diverse as quantum mechanics, statistical physics, nanotechnology, neuroscience, linguistics, economics and sociology. Increasingly, mathematical models in these fields are expressed in algorithmic languages and describe algorithmic processes. The speaker will briefly describe connections between quantum computing and the foundations of quantum mechanics, and between statistical mechanics and phase transitions in computation. He will indicate how the growth of the Web has created new phenomena to be investigated by sociologists and economists. He will then focus in greater detail on computational molecular biology, where the view of living cells as complex information processing systems has become the dominant paradigm, and will discuss specific algorithmic problems arising in the sequencing of genomes, the comparative analysis of the resulting genomic sequences, the modeling of networks of interacting proteins, and the associations between genetic variation and disease.