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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Symmetry attracts us. Studies comparing people’s reactions to different faces have shown, for example, that they find highly symmetrical faces more attractive than less symmetrical faces. The symmetry ...

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 ...

Images of plants painted on pottery made up to 8,000 years ago may be the earliest example of humans’ mathematical thought, a study has found.

Presidency University's Department of Mathematics hosted Symmetry '25, drawing nearly 260 participants for a day of lectures, contests, and cultural exchange. The festival featured talks by Professor ...

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 ...