New math for biology is the old new math.

It's true. If you live long enough, you will see good ideas (and bad) come, go, and return again. So if you're old enough to remember the early 1960s songster/musical prankster, Tom Lehrer, you might remember his clever satire called “New Math,” which lampooned a popular curriculum reform of the same name. New math's proponents championed the teaching of set theory, Boolean algebra, vectors, matrices and Markov chains, combinatorics, and a little splash of game theory. The motivating factor behind this revolutionary outlook was that these skills would come in handy in the physical sciences, social sciences, and—yes—life sciences. Fast-forward four decades to 2004 and, sure enough, such skills are even more useful now than in those post-Sputnik driven days of science education. But today, most of our students don't possess them—and most of them didn't back then, either. What happened? Did the new math movement wither away out of neglect or no respect? No, not completely. In fact, new math did get integrated in bits and pieces into undergraduate and even into high school curricula, surviving the scorn of “back to basics” movements. Various components of new math, in the form of “finite” or “discrete” mathematics courses, were “grafted” into undergraduate courses, especially those substituting for or supplementing the (still) traditional year of calculus, particularly in courses for non-science majors. So is there a problem here? Now, in the age of the “new biology,” especially, systems biology, I think there is. Our biology students still tend to be math-averse and many of us instructors could stand a brushing-up, if not outright resuscitation, of our own math skills, which may have atrophied from disuse.