Math in Biology?

[Voltman]

I remember my year 11 biology teacher telling my class that to be good at biology you need to be good at math. But I wasn't sure if she meant that specifically for VCE biology. I haven't seen any difficult biology problems with any math. In fact, at the moment the only things that I can think of that even relate to math in some way is the surface area-to-volume ratio and genetics stuff which we cover a little later. Any ideas of where anyone would find any math (e.g. in polarisation and depolarisation perhaps)? Honestly, I really don't know.

[shinny]

There's a bit of probability (hardly) in genetics, and a bit of counting work in unit 3 with regards to biomacromolecules which I wouldn't really consider mathematics. An example of this would be 'How many water molecules are required to break a polypeptide chain which consists of 100 monomers?'. Seems simple enough but even my teacher got this kind of question wrong. Overall, I wouldn't worry about it though as I've never really come across any one having any issues with the 'math' in Biology.

[NE2000]

VCE Biology has pretty much zero math

In Unit Four you will have to work out the probability of particular events happening or work out ratios. Eg: two heterozygotes for albinism have a child, what is the probability of the child being albino?

Which is just 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4

So you don't really need more than that for Bio

In Unit Four you do some Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium stuff and that's pretty interesting but they don't ask you about that stuff in the exam. I heard uni bio has some maths.