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.

The study of our ever-shifting, tangle of a genome is called topology. Javier Arsuaga harnesses this area of mathematics in tandem with machine learning and computational modeling to investigate how diseases, like breast cancer, spread.