A Mathematical Medley

In the 160 years since Darwin’s Origin of Species, biologists have developed sophisticated ways to uncover and study the hidden shared ancestry of life from genomic data.  While Darwin was able to formulate his ideas without using mathematics, he later wrote how he regretted not having studied that subject further.   Mathematics has allowed biologists to better tease apart evolutionary signal from noise and bias in data, and to build more reliable phylogenetic trees and networks, as well as providing some interesting mathematical questions. Combinatorics and probability have played the main role, however, in recent years other fields, such as algebraic geometry and topology, have also led to new insights . In this talk, I provide an overview of how ideas from mathematics have become central to the study and visualisation of evolution.