Stephen Smale gave a lecture today in the MSU math department, on protein binding and folding. He mainly presented the mathematical aspects and it was a bit like magic. If (as claimed) his methods, which could be described as coming from machine learning, actually give the best results to date on these problems it really
is magic.
Title: Mathematics of Protein Folding
Abstract: Learning methods are used to create a geometry on spaces of amino acid sequences. This geometry is used to study immunology, in particular in the peptide binding problem. Then these ideas are used to obtain new results in protein folding.
