Connecting Biology and Mathematics: First Prepare the Teachers

Developing the connection between biology and mathematics is one of the most important ways to shift the paradigms of both established science disciplines. However, adding some mathematic content to biology or biology content to mathematics is not enough but must be accompanied by development of suitable pedagogical models. I propose a model of pedagogical mathematical biological content knowledge as a feasible starting point for connecting biology and mathematics in schools and universities. The process of connecting these disciplines should start as early as possible in the educational process, in order to produce prepared minds that will be able to combine both disciplines at graduate and postgraduate levels of study. Because teachers are a crucial factor in introducing innovations in education, the first step toward such a goal should be the education of prospective and practicing elementary and secondary school teachers

Solving the nonlinear transportation problem by global optimization

The aim of this paper is to present the suitability of three different global optimization methods for specifically the exact optimum solution of the nonlinear transportation problem (NTP). The evaluated global optimization methods include the branch and reduce method, the branch and cut method and the combination of global and local search strategies. The considered global optimization methods were applied to solve NTPs with reference to literature. NTPs were formulated as nonlinear programming (NLP) optimization problems. The obtained optimal results were compared with those got from literature. A comparative evaluation of global optimization methods is presented at the end of the paper to show their suitability for solving NTPs