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 ...

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 ...

Jason Lotay explains how mathematicians studying special geometries are collaborating with physicists to explore M-theory, an 11-dimensional description of the world that unifies the various string ...

Symplectic geometry is a relatively new field with implications for much of modern mathematics. Here’s what it’s all about. In the early 1800s, William Rowan Hamilton discovered a new kind of ...

In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...

Math scholar and alumna Carolyn Yackel uses fiber arts to explore some of the most fundamental patterns in geometry ...