On 5th September Roman Chaika, Nikita Fadeev, Artur Khasanov, Elias Benussi, Mikita Kudlovich, Demid Monzin, Guerino Panetta and David Harris had the pleasure of attending Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science Marcus Du Sautoy's talk "Finding Moonshine': A mathematician's journey through symmetry.", held in the brand new Andrew Wiles building, home to the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University.
Perhaps "Odyssey" would be a more apt word to describe the fascinating adventure we enjoyed; Professor Du Sautoy showed us why the concept of symmetry, familiar to us all, is so profound due to its power and universality. With eloquence, humour and an obvious passion for his subject, Professor Du Sautoy showed how symmetry gives us a way to engage with and understand underlying structures in Nature, Art, Music, Architecture and of course Mathematics, across dimensions of time and culture. For example, we learned about the 17 different symmetric tiling patterns in the Alhambra palace.
In the question and answer session at the end, Professor Du Sautoy adroitly dealt with the old chestnut "Is Maths discovered or invented?", the source of many a debate in TOK class, as well as a question about justifying mathematical research on the basis of whether it is "useful".
We left, walking on the brand new Penrose tiling pattern design the path leading from the Andrew Wiles building, with a deeper appreciation of symmetry.
