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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...