James D. Murray

James Dickson Murray FRS, (born Moffat, Scotland, 2 January 1931) is Professor Emeritus of applied mathematics at University of Washington and University of Oxford.

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Educated at St. Andrews University where he received with honours a Bachelor Degree in Mathematics in 1953, he took his PhD there in 1956. His first post was at the University of Durham, UK, later he has held positions at Harvard University, London and Oxford, becoming Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan in 1965, at the age of 34.

He later became Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford, a fellow and tutor in mathematics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and founder and Director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology. He left Oxford, in the late 1980s for the University of Washington in Seattle, where he spent the rest of his career as Professor of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Zoology.

His research is characterised by its great range and depth: an early example is his fundamental contributions to understanding the biomechanics of the human body when launched from an aircraft in an ejection seat. He has made contributions to many other areas, ranging from understanding and preventing severe scarring; fingerprint formation; sex determination, modeling of animal coat and territory formation in wolf-deer interacting populations.

He is best known for his authoritative and extensive work entitled Mathematical Biology, recently re-edited.

Selected publications

• Mathematical Biology. 3rd edition in 2 volumes: Mathematical Biology: I. An Introduction (551 pages) 2002; Mathematical Biology: II. Spatial Models and Biomedical Applications (811 pages) 2003 (second printings 2004).
• On the mechanochemical theory of biological pattern formation with application to vasculogenesis. Comptes Rendus Acad. Sci. Paris (Biologies) 326: 239-252, 2003.
• On the use of quantitative modeling to help understand PSA dynamics and other medical problems (with K.R. Swanson and L.D. True). Amer. J. Clin. Pathol., 119(1):14-7, 2003
• Virtual and real brain tumors: using mathematical modeling to quantify glioma growth and invasion (with K.R. Swanson, C. Bridge, and E.C. Alvord), Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 216(1):1-10, 2003.
• Virtual brain tumors (gliomas) enhance the reality of medical imaging and highlight inadequacies of current therapy (with K.R. Swanson and E.C. Alvord). British J. Cancer 86: 14-18, 2002. [Abstracted for inclusion in the 2003 Yearbook of the Institute of Oncology]
• Pattern formation, biological. In: The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks (ed. M.A. Arbib) pp. 851-859, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002.
• The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (with J.M. Gottman, C. Swanson, R. Tyson, and K.R. Swanson). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002.
• A mathematical model for the dynamics of serum prostate specific antigen as a marker for cancerous growth (with K.R. Swanson, D. Lin, L. True, K. Buhler and R. Vassella). Amer. J. Pathol. 158(6): 2195-2199, 2001.