Mathematicians delight in the beauty of math that so many of us don’t see. But nature is a wonderful realm in which to observe beauty born out of mathematical relationships.

The natural world provides seemingly endless patterns underpinned by numbers – if we can recognize them.

Luckily for us, a motley team of researchers has just uncovered another striking connection between math and nature; between one of the purest forms of mathematics, number theory, and the mechanisms governing the evolution of life on molecular scales, genetics.