The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry

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 Astronomer and the former Head of the Science Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the institute that conducts the scientific program of the Hubble Space Telescope. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from Tel Aviv University in Israel and was a professor in the Physics Department at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology from 1981 to 1991, when he joined STScI. Dr. Livio has published more than 400 scientific papers and has received numerous awards for research and for excellence in teaching. 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, and The Accelerating Universe.