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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The beautiful color illustration of frieze patterns above is taken from Frank A. Farris’ Creating Symmetry: The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns (Princeton University Press, 2015), a math book ...

A shape has a line of symmetry when the folded part sits perfectly on top with all edges matching. The number of lines of symmetry in a regular polygon is equal to the number of sides. A shape has ...

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 ...