I thank my mother for being my first mentor, Michael Levitt for providing a tremendous amount of intellectual inspiration and motivation; John Moult for being my mentor in graduate school and giving me a solid direction to proceed; Douglas Hofstadter for writing Gödel, Escher, Bach; David Searls for that one memorable interview I had with him where I was first introduced to the relationship between formal language theory and DNA; Naomi Cotton for provoking me to write the chapter on strange loops in biology; Gerry Goldstein for guiding me to the right path in molecular biology; Bobby Krishnamurthi for picking out the flaws in my thinking and for giving me new ideas; Jeff Nunemacher for constantly pushing me and make me realise I could achieve my dreams; and Alan Zaring for being a friend, philosopher, and the guiding inspiration of my undergraduate life.
If the above were the source of my inspiration, my computational biology research group is the vehicle and the source of my hope. I am thus grateful beyond all measure to all my mentors and mentees, my friends at Ohio Wesleyan University, the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology, Stanford, the University of Washington, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and all the people I've annoyed in the various computing and wet laboratories, across the Internet and the Web, and other places with my ramblings, and all the people who've read this and made suggestions! If this nontome is an any way informative and useful, it is due to their tireless patience and constructive criticism.