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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Mathematics is visible everywhere in nature, even where we are not expecting it. It can help explain the way galaxies spiral, a seashell curves, patterns replicate, and rivers bend. Even subjective ...