Member-only story
Cancer for dummies: A mathematical introduction to cancer
Explaining cancer growth and treatment from a mathematical point of view
Have you ever been interested in a topic that strands so far away from your previous studies that you feel too overwhelmed about all that you would need to learn before you can even begin to understand it? I had precisely this problem with the topic of cancer and that is why I decided to write about it.
Quick disclaimer
I am no health professional or biologist, I am a computer scientist, so my understanding (and consequently explanation) of cancer is super limited and there are many things about the disease that I haven’t even begin to understand. So even though I will explain it in the best of my capacities, be aware that I might provide some small inaccuracies, mainly in the naming of some phenomenon. While my previous degrees are in computer science, this year I began a PhD in Math and Stats and I am doing my doctoral research at the Computational Biology program at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, doing cancer treatment research. It has been quite an ordeal because I will have to produce breakthrough science in a field of study where I do not even understand what most of the words mean, or how concepts relate to each other, whenever I read a very technical…
