Karen Heyman | Oct 24, 2004 | 9 min read
On a coffee break from the Methods in Computational Neuroscience class he codirects at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass., Bard Ermentrout is chatting with a student. It's unusually difficult to follow the conversation, because Ermentrout, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, is talking entirely in equations – in near parody of most biologists' worst fears of a field populated largely by physicists and mathematicians. But de