The dawn of mathematical biology

In this paper I describe the early development of the so-called mathematical biophysics, as conceived by Nicolas Rashevsky back in the 1920's, as well as his latter idealization of a "relational biology". I also underline that the creation of the journal "The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics" was instrumental in legitimating the efforts of Rashevsky and his students, and I finally argue that his pioneering efforts, while still largely unacknowledged, were vital for the development of important scientific contributions, most notably the McCulloch-Pitts model of neural networks.Comment: 9 pages, without figure

Existentially closed fields with G-derivations

We prove that the theories of fields with Hasse-Schmidt derivations corresponding to actions of formal groups admit model companions. We also give geometric axiomatizations of these model companions.Comment: In version 2: new proof of (the current) Proposition 3.3

Integrating Hasse-Schmidt derivations

We study integrating (that is expanding to a Hasse-Schmidt derivation) derivations, and more generally truncated Hasse-Schmidt derivations, satisfying iterativity conditions given by formal group laws. Our results concern the cases of the additive and the multiplicative group laws. We generalize a theorem of Matsumura about integrating nilpotent derivations (such a generalization is implicit in work of Ziegler) and we also generalize a theorem of Tyc about integrating idempotent derivations