Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Symmetry also has an aesthetic meaning, although this is ...

In his new book Creating Symmetry, Frank Farris uses ideas from advanced mathematics, such as complex analysis and abstract algebra, to transform snapshots of landscapes, flowers, or even his dinner ...

The 2008 Abel Prize was awarded to John Griggs Thompson of the University of Florida and Jacques Tits of the Collège de France for their contributions to group theory, the mathematical field that ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...

There's a part of the brain that enables us to perceive magnitude -- we can compare loudness when hearing different tones or compare the number of dots in a group at a glance. Neuroscientists have ...

A group of mathematicians has shown that at critical moments, a symmetry called rotational invariance is a universal property across many physical systems. For more than 50 years, mathematicians have ...

On the road to algebra, children must learn a weird idea: that numbers can be smaller than zero (negative) and can be mixed with numbers greater than zero (positive) in an equation. Now researchers at ...

Physicists have a lot in common with Ponce de León and U2’s Bono. After decades of searching, they aren’t getting any younger. And they still haven’t found what they’re looking for. In this case, the ...

If you want to fully describe how the Universe works at a fundamental level, you have to look at it in two different — and incompatible — ways. To describe the particles and their electromagnetic and ...