How AI Can Advance Mathematical Biology: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

Mathematical biology has long relied on mechanistic models, including ordinary and partial differential equations, stochastic systems, and agent-based models, to study biological processes across scales. These approaches remain central because they provide structure, interpretability, and biological insight. However, modern biological and biomedical data, including longitudinal clinical records, medical imaging, and multi-omics measurements, are often high-dimensional, noisy, heterogeneous, and incomplete. These features make model calibration, simulation, and uncertainty quantification increasingly difficult. As a result, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing a growing role in mathematical biology, not as replacements for mechanistic modeling, but as complementary tools that can support prediction, hybrid modeling, inference, and control. In this review, we organize these uses of AI from a mathematical biology perspective and examine how data-driven and mechanistic approaches interact across different modeling tasks. The selected examples span biomedical, epidemiological, ecological, evolutionary, biochemical, and population-level systems, while the review is intended to be representative rather than exhaustive. We emphasize recurring challenges that strongly affect biological credibility and practical usefulness, including interpretability, identifiability, generalization, and uncertainty quantification. Our goal is to clarify the roles AI can play in mathematical biology and to highlight the opportunities and limitations that arise when flexible learning methods are integrated with biologically grounded modeling.