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World Service,4 mins

“Like looking at an absolute truth” – the beauty of equations

Newshour

Available for over a year

Mathematicians see the same beauty in complex figures and numbers as they do in a piece of Mozart or a painting by Monet, new research suggests. A group of fifteen mathematicians were shown "ugly" and "beautiful" equations while in a brain scanner at University College London - and the beautiful equations provoked a clear response in the part of the brain that deals with emotions. Hannah Fry is from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis here in London.

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