Discovering Curiosity: The Tangled Fate of Math and Biology with Professor Mariel Vazquez
Professor Mariel Vazquez fished out the headphones and placed them atop the desk in her office in the Mathematical Sciences Building. She started uncoiling the mess.
“Mathematicians love the beauty of knots,” said Vazquez. “They love the underlying structures that can be very abstract and very complicated.”
She laid the cord as flat as she could, straightening it across the desk. A tangled loop caught her eye.
“Look, there’s a knot,” she said. “It formed there by itself; I didn’t tie it.”
Knots are a part of nature. From pocketed headphones to carelessly packed garden hoses, they find ways to manifest in strings and loops. This isn’t just a truth of mathematics; it’s a truth of biology. In fact, DNA molecules can also get tied into knots.