In a survey article Angela Stevens describes her personal point of view of the relation between mathematics and life-sciences by considering four classical examples of mathematical biology. These are Turing’s diffusion-reaction systems in morphogenesis, Hodkin’s and Huxley’s model on the initiation and propagation of action potentials in a nerve fibre, chemotaxis models, and the mathematical analysis of molecular sequence characteristics.

In the category Classics Revisited David E. Rowe compares with Bernhard Riemann’s “Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen” and David Hilbert’s “Grundlagen der Geometrie” two famous and influental texts which recently were reprinted in the Springer Series Klassische Texte der Wissenschaft.

Ernst Eberlein, Hans Föllmer, Michael Keane, Ulrich Krengel, and Volker Strassen wrote an obituary about Konrad Jacobs, an outstanding mathematician with a lot of impact on the development of probability theory and statistics in Germany after the Second World War. The authors describe his contributions to Poincare’s recurrence theorem, to Toeplitz sequences, to mean ergodic theory, to strict ergodicity, and to information theory.

Finally, there are two book reviews. Wilfried Sieg reviews a book edited by Reinhard Kahle and Michael Rathjen about Gerhard Gentzen who became famous through his consistency proof for arithmetic. Nick Gurski reviews a book of Donald Yau about Colored Operads.

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue.