Leon Glass and the Wandering Thoughts Podcast
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| From Clocks to Chaos, by Glass and Mackey. |
Chapter 10 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology talks about nonlinear dynamics, and in particular how simple sets of nonlinear differential equations can lead to chaotic behavior. One researcher who Russ Hobbie and I mention often is Leon Glass. We cite his book with Michael Mackey, From Clocks to Chaos, which influenced me as a young scientist, and his textbook with Daniel Kaplan, Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics.
Recently I discovered a wonderful interview with Glass where he describes his life and work. It’s part of a podcast series titled Wandering Thoughts, and you can listen to it below. It’s over two hours long, but Glass talks slowly and I could understand it at 2× speed or even faster. It’s well worth the time.
Several topics covered in the interview will be interesting to readers of IPMB and of this blog. I’ve always been interested in how physicists end up learning and studying biology, and conversely how biologists learn physics. Right at the start of the interview Glass outlines his own circuitous path toward biological physics. Everyone has their own unique path, but Glass’s highlights one feature I find common in many: it isn’t part of a grand master plan, but just sort of happens, and is catalyzed by interactions with other scientists. Glass describes his work on the periodic electrical stimulation of chick heart cells, which Russ and I illustrate using a figure from one of his papers (in IPMB, it’s Fig. 10.36). Stimulation can simply drive the system in a 1:1 behavior, or give a more complicated periodic behavior at a lower frequency, or produce deterministic chaos. This is lovely work and Glass was one of the pioneers. He also talks about the modeling of spiral waves as an example of a heart arrhythmia, a concept studied by his friend and collegue Art Winfree. (In 2013 Glass won the Arthur T. Winfree Prize awarded by the Society of Mathematical Biology.) When asked what traits were most valuable to him in his career, Glass mentioned curiosity and tenacity. Those two traits would be useful to anyone wanting to learn biological physics from IPMB.
This podcast provides insight into what a career in biological physics is like. Enjoy!
Chaos in Biological Systems, with Leon Glass, on The Wandering Thoughts podcast.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=aDx9t2vA9s0
Source: http://hobbieroth.blogspot.com/2026/09/leon-glass-and-wandering-thoughts.html
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