User:NBeale/Corina Tarniţă

Corina E. Tarniţă is a Romanian mathematician who works on evolutionary dynamics.

Career
In 2010 she was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows.

That year she co-authored a paper with Martin Nowak and EO Wilson that was featured on the front cover of Nature and generated widespread coverage. The paper attacked the concept of "inclusive fitness", saying it is wrong. Reviewing decades of papers calculating inclusive fitness, Tarnita said she did not find that any rigorous mathematical analysis had been done to assess the conditions under which an inclusive fitness calculation could be used.

Explaining the conclusions of Tarnita and her colleagues, the science magazine New Scientist explained that they view the problem as being that the calculations of inclusive fitness:

don't work ... because they rely on a limiting set of conditions that nature does not stick to. For example, they are only valid for interactions between pairs of animals ... but no use in studying thousands of ants sharing a colony. What's more, they do not work for populations that are under strong pressure to evolve.

These and other limitations, Tarnita says, mean that the maths of inclusive fitness is not relevant to the real world. Instead, she says biologists should use the models of population genetics, which focus on interactions between different gene variants. These models avoid the messiness of predicting the consequences of behaviour and don't require any dubious assumptions.

Tarnita has shown that by using standard population genetics equations, it is possible to produce an all-encompassing model.

She was also awarded "Student of the year in North America" by the Romanian Government.

In 2009 she was awarded the HighBridge Prize by Harvard's Department of Mathematics for the best PhD thesis.

Articles

 * "The evolution of eusociality" Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, E.O. Wilson Nature, 466, 1057-62 (2010).
 * "Evolutionary dynamics in structured populations" Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, Tibor Antal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 365, 19-30 (2010).
 * "Calculating evolutionary dynamics in structured populations" Charles G. Nathanson*, Corina E. Tarnita*, Martin A. Nowak PLoS Computational Biology, 5(12): e1000615 (2009). *joint first authors.
 * "Mutation-selection equilibrium in games with mixed strategies" Corina E. Tarnita, Tibor Antal, Martin A. Nowak Journal of Theoretical Biology, 261, 50-57 (2009).
 * "Evolutionary dynamics in set structured populations" Corina E. Tarnita, Tibor Antal, Hisashi Ohtsuki, Martin A. Nowak Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 106, 8601 (2009).
 * "Strategy selection in structured populations" Corina E. Tarnita, Hisashi Ohtsuki, Tibor Antal, Feng Fu, Martin A. Nowak Journal of Theoretical Biology, 259, 570-81 (2009).

Books

 * Matematica: Teme pregătitoare pentru Olimpiada (Mathematics: Topics for Olympiads) Raluca Ciurcea, Caludiu Coanda, Iuliana Coravu, Carmen Georgescu, Liliana Niculescu, Corina Tarniţă Pătraşcu, Cristian Schneider, Virgiliu Schneider, 2002, Valeriu Publishing House, Craiova, 2004


 * Probleme Alese pentru Matematica de Performanţă (Selected Problems for Mathematical Competitions) Corina E. Tarniţă, Apollo Publishing House, Craiova, 2001