Why do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I've written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that's covered with tiny squares? It's the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a "periodic tiling of space", with shapes covering an ...

Before being mortally wounded in a duel at age 20, Évariste Galois discovered the hidden structure of polynomial equations. By studying the relationships between their solutions — rather than the ...

Ordered materials with 7-fold, 9-fold or 11-fold symmetries are never observed in nature. Researchers discovered the reason for this when they tried to impose a 7-fold symmetry on a layer of charged ...

Although Einstein’s theory of space-time seems more complicated than Newtonian physics, it greatly simplified the mathematical description of the universe. Isaac Newton and other premodern physicists ...

Why do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I’ve written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...