Expositions of quantitative methods and algorithms for biological data tend to be scattered through the technical literature, often across different fields, and are thus awkward to assimilate. This book documents one example of this: the relationship between the cell biology idea of metabolic networks and the mathematical idea of polyhedral cones. Such cones can be used to describe the set of steady-state admissible fluxes through metabolic networks, and consequently have become important constructs in the field of microbiology. Via convex cone concepts, fundamental objects called elementary flux modes (EFMs) can be described mathematically. The fundamental algorithm of this relationship is the double description method, which has an extended history in the field of computational geometry. This monograph addresses its relatively recent use in the context of cellular metabolism. Metabolic Networks, Elementary Flux Modes, and Polyhedral Cones: Addresses important topics in the mathematical description of metabolic activity that have not previously appeared in unified form. Introduces a central topic of mathematical systems biology in a manner accessible to nonmathematicians with some mathematical and computational experience. Presents a careful study of the double description method, a fundamental algorithm of computational geometry, in the context of metabolic analysis. The core audience for this book includes mathematicians, engineers, and biologists interested in cell metabolism. Computational geometers will also find it of interest.

The year 2018 marked the 75th anniversary of the founding of Mathematics of Computation, one of the four primary research journals published by the American Mathematical Society and the oldest research journal devoted to computational mathematics. To celebrate this milestone, the symposium “Celebrating 75 Years of Mathematics of Computation” was held from November 1–3, 2018, at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), Providence, Rhode Island. The sixteen papers in this volume, written by the symposium speakers and editors of the journal, include both survey articles and new contributions. On the discrete side, there are four papers covering topics in computational number theory and computational algebra. On the continuous side, there are twelve papers covering topics in machine learning, high dimensional approximations, nonlocal and fractional elliptic problems, gradient flows, hyperbolic conservation laws, Maxwell's equations, Stokes's equations, a posteriori error estimation, and iterative methods. Together they provide a snapshot of significant achievements in the past quarter century in computational mathematics and also in important current trends.