Exciting challenges lie ahead as we are still only beginning to get a glimpse of the answer to the fundamental questions of what constitutes living systems, what are the common rules and principles that govern their characteristics.

Progress in modern biology has seen accumulation of vast knowledge regarding the molecular interactions that underpin living systems. From the vast sequencing data, protemomics to fluorescence microscopy images, the field enjoys abundance of quantitative data, inevitably placing the discipline much closer to physics, chemistry and mathematics than ever before. Exciting challenges lie ahead as we are still only beginning to get a glimpse of the answer to the fundamental questions of what constitutes living systems, what are the common rules and principles that govern their characteristics. These questions inevitably involve mathematics and quantitative thinking so as to link idea to equations, quantity to quality, data to concepts.