Trees Built for Biologists

Where would physics and engineering be without mathematics? We are familiar with how mathematics interacts, including via Calculus and ordinary and partial differential equations, with chemistry and physics. What may not be common knowledge is how much the life sciences are benefiting from mathematics, and how mathematics benefits from the life sciences, in particular biology. Here I will look at how a 150-year-old metaphor of there being a "tree of life" has benefited mathematics, biology, the rapidly growing fields of mathematical biology, genetics, bioinformatics, computational biology, genomics, and other academic subjects on the borderlines between mathematics, statistics, computer science, and biology.