Even though I am a mathematician, I look at [fetal development] with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us?

Tsiaras frames fetal development as an almost computational process—an “instruction set” (DNA and cellular signaling) executing a staggeringly complex build of a human body. The remark juxtaposes his identity as a mathematician—someone trained to expect formal rules and error-checking—with the biological reality that, despite noise and variation, development is usually robust enough to produce a viable organism. The rhetorical question underscores awe at biological self-organization and error-correction: not that mistakes never occur, but that the system’s reliability is extraordinary given its complexity. It also hints at a broader theme in Tsiaras’s work: using scientific visualization to restore a sense of wonder about the hidden mechanics of life.