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 ...

Long before anyone wrote down a number, early villagers were painting flowers with a precision that looks suspiciously like ...

On a set of broken clay bowls from northern Mesopotamia, delicate flower patterns have turned out to be something far more radical than decoration. New analysis of this ancient art suggests that early ...

Frank A. Farris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

Over 8,000 years ago, early farming communities in northern Mesopotamia were already thinking mathematically—long before numbers were written down. By closely studying Halafian pottery, researchers ...

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 ...

Teaching Children Mathematics (TCM) is an official journal of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and is intended as a resource for elementary school students, teachers, and teacher ...

A leopard is chasing a zebra, bound to follow the laws of nature and natural selection, down a sand dune and across a plain of dried mud, bound to the laws of geology and sediments. The stripes of the ...

The 2008 Abel Prize was awarded to John Griggs Thompson of the University of Florida and Jacques Tits of the Collège de France for their contributions to group theory, the mathematical field that ...