What do we mean by exponential growth? How quickly does your bank balance grow? How quickly does a cup of tea cool, or radium decay? What shape is a washing line and what is the link with a single mysterious number?

​Sometimes a solution can be reduced to a single element.

What is in a name? A lot if you're a biologist. Similarly how we have nuclear families, extended families, and far flung cousins, all species are related and some are closer to each other than others. Taxonomy is a way for us to keep track on where each species belong on the tree of life, it's part of our collective family history, so to speak.

It's funny how some of the things we do to stave off boredom tent to be things that stimulate or challenge our minds. Or maybe it's not a coincidence? The Sumerians who developed the first concepts that eventually became mathematics also developed the particularly compelling Royal Game of Ur, and the same can be said with Indians and chess.

Coincidence? I think not!

Mathematics, the basis of everything from physics to chemistry to biology. And hence, it must be older than any of them. So to understand nature and it's inner workings, we must first understand maths.

And what better way to understand something than to trace its history and development?

One of the most basic questions in biology throughout history is regarding our origins: how did we came to be? Paleonto-biologists look of answers in our past, evolutionary biologists look at other species (our biological cousins, so to speak). But developmental biologists look for it from how we were created: the first few moments of our conception.

By studying this, we may discover more than our origins, maybe even our purpose in nature.