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 ...

For decades, temporal and inversion symmetry were taught as static geometric concepts, but 2026 has shattered that view with real-world demonstrations of symmetry in motion. From the first ...

This jingle has helped generations of algebra students recall the quadratic formula that solves every equation of the form $latex ax^2+bx+c=0$. The formula is as ...

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 ...

Einstein referred to her as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. Her theorem has been recognized as “one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the ...

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 ...

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 study of geometric symmetry and polytopal structures explores the ways in which symmetry groups act on multi‐dimensional objects known as polytopes. Convex polytopes have been studied since ...