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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

Long before anyone wrote down a number, early villagers were painting flowers with a precision that looks suspiciously like ...

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 ...

On a set of broken clay bowls from northern Mesopotamia, delicate flower patterns have turned out to be something far more radical than decoration. New analysis of this ancient art suggests that early ...

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 ...

Over 8,000 years ago, early farming communities in northern Mesopotamia were already thinking mathematically—long before numbers were written down. By closely studying Halafian pottery, researchers ...

Here’s how physicists calculate g-2, the value that will determine whether the muon is giving us a sign of new physics. Like racecars on a track, thousands of particles called muons zip around an ...