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 despite the alien nature of the conversation, the questions that computational neuroscientists ask are becoming the questions that all neuroscientists ask. Indeed, "computational neuroscientist" eventually may become a redundant term.
"Anybody who concerns him or herself with how the brain computes is a computational neuroscientist independent of the technique they use," says Christiane Linster, assistant professor at Cornell University and current president of the Organization for Computational Neurosciences. "I would hope that eventually computational neuroscience ...
