Three Decades Later, Mystery Numbers Explained (quantamagazine.org)

If you get a 404 on the link (like I did), click on Mathematics at the top, then on the article.

It's nice to see "tropical geometry" get a mention. This is closely related to Dijkstra's algorithm, min-sum message passing, etc.

I didn't understand much beyond what zeta values are, but have to say that that illustration opening the article is awesome.