Reviews and commentary on computational biology by Lior Pachter
The philosopher Felix Hausdorff, famous for his foundational philosophical work Das Chaos in kosmischer Auslese (Chaos in Cosmic Selection) in which he rejects metaphysics, also did mathematics as a hobby . In mathematics he is known for Hausdorff spaces, the Hausdorff paradox, the Hausdorff gap, etc. etc. Hausdorff became a professor of mathematics in Leipzig, Germany, [ ]
Among the millions of pages in the Epstein files, there is an inconspicuous, seemingly mundane short email, EFTA00896810, dated 14th September, 2010. It is a message from Jeffrey Epstein to Martin Nowak (at the time Professor of Mathematics and Biology at Harvard University) and Corina Tarnita (at the time a Junior Fellow at Harvard, now [ ]
In a paper titled THEOREMS FOR A PRICE: Tomorrow s Semi-Rigorous Mathematics Culture published in 1993, mathematician Doron Zeilberger wrote: There are writings on the wall that, now that the silicon savior has arrived, a new testament is going to be written. Although there will always be a small group of “rigorous” old-style mathematicians(e.g. [JQ]) who [ ]
James Watson, who described himself as not a racist in a conventional way , has died at the age of 97. Below is a review of an obituary for Dr. James Watson published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on November 7, 2025. The obituary is in black and the review comments are in red. Jim Watson [ ]
The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss invented the heliotrope for long-distance surveying in 1821. Just a year later, he proved that least squares regression provided the BLUE estimator for data with uncorrelated Gaussian errors (with mean zero and equal variance). The heliotrope tool and the least squares method allowed Gauss to perform a geodetic survey of [ ]
In the Nature paper Spatial transcriptomics reveal neuron–astrocyte synergy in long-term memory published on March 14th, 2024, authors Sun et al. claimed to identify cell-type specific transcriptional signatures of memory in mouse basolateral amygdala. These claims were refuted in a Matters Arising reply published on June 4th, 2025 by Eran Mukamel and Zhaoxia Yu titled [ ]
Earlier this year I came across this interesting post by mathematician Daniel Litt, where he pondered how many intrinsically true results in mathematics have been published with erroneous proofs: Does it even matter if a proof is erroneous when the result is true? Does someone reading a wrong proof of a true theorem truly know [ ]
by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter Background (by LL) Four years ago, during the first year of my PhD at Caltech, I participated in a journal club organized by the lab I was rotating in. I was assigned two classic papers on the honeybee waggle dance: “Visually Mediated Odometry in Honeybees” (Srinivasan et al., JEB [ ]
In a Tablet Magazine article titled How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers posted on March 6, 2024, Professor of Statistics and Data Science Abraham Wyner from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania argues that statistical analysis of the casualty numbers reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health is highly suggestive [ ]
The All of Us Research Program, whose mission is to to accelerate health research and medical breakthroughs, enabling individualized prevention, treatment, and care for all of us , recently published a flagship paper in Nature on Genomic Data in the All of Us Research Program . This is a review of Figure 2 from the paper (referred [ ]