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'What Immortal hand or eye dare frame thy
fearful symmetry?' asked William Blake, referring to the
tiger. Nature's patterns are a source of inspiration and
awe; and also of scientific problems. Have you ever wondered
why tigers have stripes but leopards have spots? Did you
know that snails are seldom left-handed? Did you realize
that chaos can be used to design textiles? And have you
ever tried to work out how a three-legged dog would walk?
Philosophers and scientists, from Plato
to Dirac, have been so impressed by the patterns visible
in the natural world that they have declared God a mathematician.
If the signature of a Dicing Deity is chaos, then the signature
of a Geometer God is symmetry. Paradoxically, it is the
breaking of symmetry that is responsible for many
of nature's patterns.
Fearful Symmetry will open your eyes to
the broken symmetries that lie all around you, from the
shapes of clouds to the drops of dew on a spider's web,
from the glittering facets of a diamond to the hoofbeats
of a galloping horse, from centipedes to corn circles, it
will take you into the depths of the atom, where broken
symmetry controls the four basic forces of nature; and to
the farthest reaches of the universe, where unimaginably
large structures formed by millions of galaxies cast doubt
upon current theories of the cosmos. It will bring you face
to face with some of the deepest questions of modern science:
the arrow of time, the handedness of life, and the origins
of biological form.
Ian Stewart is Professor of Mathematics
at the University of Warwick,and the author of over fifty
books including Game, Set, and Math and the best-selling
Does God Play Dice? He writes the Mathematical Recreations
column in Scientific American and often appears in
New Scientist and on radio. He is a research mathematician
working on dynamical systems, aiming to develop practical
applications of new ideas from pure mathematics. As a hobby
he writes science fiction and keeps fish.
Martin Golubitsky is Cullen Distinguished
Professor of Mathematics and Director of The Institute for
Theoretical and Engineering Science at the University of
Houston. He has written extensively both on how symmetries
are useful when solving mathematical models and what implications
these ideas have for experiments. Recently Golubitsky has
concentrated his efforts on how symmetry and chaos combine
to generate a new method for pattern formation. He is on
the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals.
Both authors were drawn together by a
common interest in the application of new mathematical ideas
to scientific problems, worked together for a year in Houston
between 1983 and 1984, and have been collaborating intermittently
on various projects ever since.
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