Raina Robeva, Ph.D.

Title: Fascination with Fluctuation: Luria and Delbrück's Legacy

Abstract.  Over 200 years ago John Baptist Lamarck proposed his Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics hypothesis to explain evolution. About 50 years later, in his work The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin introduced the alternative concept of natural selection. Lamarck claimed that organisms adapt in response to environmental stimuli, passing the changes on to their offspring. Darwin asserted that changes occur independently of the environment but only organisms with variations that provide competitive advantage survive. Remarkably, the dispute was settled by a mathematical argument in 1943 by biologist Salvador Luria and physicist Max Delbrück and has since generated a considerable amount of mathematical literature. In celebration of the 80th anniversary of their seminal work, the talk will outline the original Luria-Delbrück idea, its use for estimating the mutation rate of bacteria, and its influence on theoretical mathematics.