Mathematical biophysics has dominated for over half a century developments in mathematical biology as theoretical or mathematical physicists have expanded their interests to applying mathematical and physical concepts to studying living organisms and in repeated attempts to ‘define life itself’ [1, 28].

A prominent early example was the famous Erwin $Schr\"{o}dinger$ ’s book (published in 1945 in Cambridge, UK) entitled suggestively “What is Life?”, and that was perhaps too critically re-evaluated a decade ago by Robert Rosen. This interesting and concise book appears to have inspired a decade later the discovery of the double helical, molecular structures of A- and B- DNA crystals/paracrystals ([26, 9, 12, 25]) by Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick and James D. Watson, with the first two (bio)physical chemists working at that time with X-ray Diffraction of DNA crystals at King’s College in London, (see also the websites about Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins), and the last two researchers working at The Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge(UK), (see also related news at, and also the new Biology and Physics of Medicine Laboratory at The Cavendish). With the notable exception of Rosalind Franklin and Robert Rosen, the other three mathematical and experimental biophysicists became Nobel Laureates in Physiology and Medicine.

Notably DNA configurations in vivo include a significant amount of dynamic, partial disorder and may be defined at best as paracrystals ([26, 9, 12]), a fact which has important consequences for functional biology and in vivo molecular genetics. Moreover, other structures (such as Z-DNA) were discovered in certain organisms, and other configurations were found under physiological conditions (see, for example, the excellent, DNA structure representations rendered by computers on pp. 852-854 in Voet and Voet, 1995 [27], as well as a recent update review [25] and earlier generalizations [14, 15]), such as the DNA G-quadruplexes that can control gene transcription and translation - especially in cancers.

Erwin $Schr\"{o}dinger$’s fundamental contribution to Quantum Mechanics preceded the others discussed in the previous paragraph by more than two decades when he formulated the fundamental equations of Quantum Mechanics which bear his name, and modestly called the operator appearing in the $Schr\"{o}dinger$ equations the “Hamiltonian operator” - a term universally employed in the Theoretical and Mathematical Physics literature that now bears the name of the distinguished Irish physicist, Sir William Rowan Hamilton. Hamilton is now also considered to be one of the world’s greatest mathematicians (see for example, his introduction of the concept of quaternions in 1835), and he was also the first foreign Member to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 1865. Subsequently, Schrödinger was awarded a Nobel Prize for his fundamental, theoretical (and mathematical) physics contribution by the Stockholm Nobel Committee, and soon thereafter in 1941 became the Director of the (Dublin) Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) in Ireland, instead of joining Albert Einstein on the staff at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies.