Traces the four-thousand-year-old mathematical effort to discover and define the laws of symmetry in nature and the arts, citing the achievements of doomed geniuses Niels Henrick Abel and Evariste Galois to solve the quintic equation and give birth to group theory. By the author of The Golden Ratio. 50,000 first printing.
Mario Livio is a senior astrophysicist and the Head of the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of The Golden Ratio, a highly acclaimed book about mathematics and art for which he received the International Pythagoras Prize and the Peano Prize, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved, and The Accelerating Universe. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.