“Why bring together two fields that seem to many people so very disparate? What could mathematics and poetry share, except that the mention of either one is sometimes enough to bring an uneasy chill ...

Mathematics and art are generally viewed as very different disciplines – one devoted to abstract thought, the other to feeling. But sometimes the parallels between the two are uncanny. From Islamic ...

John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns of every possible length. In 1969, the British mathematician John Conway devised a beguilingly simple ...

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 ...

Sean Gourley: When we sat down and looked at a conflict like Iraq, we saw that there were very strong mathematical patterns in size of attacks. And then when we looked at a conflict in a different ...

This lavishly illustrated book provides a hands-on, step-by-step introduction to the intriguing mathematics of symmetry. Instead of breaking up patterns into blocks--a sort of potato-stamp ...

Baroque German composer Johann Sebastian Bach produced music that is so scrupulously structured that it’s often compared to math. Although few among us are emotionally affected by mathematics, Bach’s ...

On a cold, rainy January morning in a café in downtown Chicago, I met Mary Silber, a leading scientist who applies mathematics to understand repetitive patterns of vegetation, which alternate ...

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 ...

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 ...