Isolating the first spark of life on Earth is a matter of biology, geology, and chemistry—but it’s also an amazing math problem. At least, that’s how Varun Varanasi viewed it when he was a Yale undergraduate. The question, in a nutshell, is this: How did the primordial soup of interacting molecules on the Earth’s surface billions of years ago transform itself from complete chaos to an organized system of self-sustaining, reproducing chemicals? Did this occur gradually over millions of years, or was it abrupt?