A brief review of some selected topics in p-adic mathematical physics is presented.

p-Adic mathematical physics is a branch of modern mathematical physics based on the application of p-adic mathematical methods in modeling physical and related phenomena. It emerged in 1987 as a result of efforts to find a non-Archimedean approach to the spacetime and string dynamics at the Planck scale, but then was extended to many other areas including biology. This paper contains a brief review of main achievements in some selected topics of p-adic mathematical physics and its applications, especially in the last decade. Attention is mainly paid to developments with promising future prospects.

Using basic properties of p-adic numbers, we consider a simple new approach to describe main aspects of DNA sequence and the genetic code. In our investigation central role plays an ultrametric p-adic information space whose basic elements are nucleotides, codons and genes. We show that a 5-adicmodel is appropriate for DNA sequence. This 5-adicmodel, combined with 2-adic distance, is also suitable for the genetic code and for amore advanced employment in genomics. We find that genetic code degeneracy is related to the p-adic distance between codons.