Why symmetry is so fundamental to our understanding of the universe

YOU might remember learning about symmetry at school. Maybe a teacher showed you a snowflake’s six-fold symmetry and you marvelled at how it looked the same no matter how you rotated it. Well, it turns out that the wonders of symmetry go a whole lot deeper – as any mathematician who has studied it will tell you.

“Instead of being something visual, which is what I responded to as a child, it became something much more abstract and linguistic in nature,” says Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician at the University of Oxford. “The understanding of symmetry I have now is…