Understanding Biological Clocks Using Methods from Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics

Imagine that you are in a room with no information about time. The room is located in a cave, where temperature and light intensity remain constant. In such an environment, would you be able to wake up tomorrow or the day after?
In fact, most humans can wake up at roughly similar times on successive days. This is because we possess internal daily rhythms, known as circadian rhythms. Biological experiments have shown that such rhythms are not unique to humans, but are shared by many species on Earth.
In this talk, I will introduce some open problems related to these daily rhythms, and discuss approaches based on dynamical systems theory and the renormalization group method, from the perspectives of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.