There has been a convergence in recent years of people from the physical
and biological sciences and from various engineering disciplines who are
interested in analyzing the electrical activity of nerve and muscle
quantita- tively. Various courses have been established at the graduate
level or final-year undergraduate level in many universities to teach
this subject matter, yet no satisfactory short text has existed. The
present book is an attempt to fill this gap, and arises from my
experience in teaching this material over the past fifteen years to
students on both sides of the Atlantic. Although covering a wide range
of biophysi- cal topics from the level of single molecules to that of
complex systems, I have attempted to keep the text relatively short by
considering only examples of the most general interest. Problems are
included whenever possible at the end of each chapter so the reader may
test his understand- ing of the material presented and consider other
examples which have not been included in the text.
