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 ...

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 ...

Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community. Carolyn Yackel, SB'92, flipped through photos of ...

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 ...

We are fond of saying things are symmetric, but what does that really mean? Intuitively we have a sense of symmetry as a kind of mirroring. Suppose we draw a vertical line through the middle of a ...

This lavishly illustrated book provides a hands-on, step-by-step introduction to the intriguing mathematics of symmetry. Instead of breaking up patterns into blocks--a sort of potato-stamp ...

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 ...

Symmetry in mathematics occurs not only in geometry, but also in other branches of mathematics. It is actually the same as invariance: the property that something does not change under a set of ...