Symmetry
in sentence
151 examples of Symmetry in a sentence
When used in every day life, the word
symmetry
represents vague notions of beauty, harmony and balance.
In math and science,
symmetry
has a different, and very specific, meaning.
In this technical sense, a
symmetry
is the property of an object.
Pretty much any type of object can have symmetry, from tangible things like butterflies, to abstract entities like geometric shapes.
Here's the definition: a
symmetry
is a transformation that leaves that object unchanged.
Let's take a close look at one example:
symmetry
in biology.
You might have noticed that there's a very familiar kind of
symmetry
we haven't mentioned yet: the
symmetry
of the right and left sides of the human body.
The transformation that gives this
symmetry
is reflection by an imaginary mirror that slices vertically through the body.
Biologists call this bilateral
symmetry.
Many other animals, foxes, sharks, beetles, that butterfly we mentioned earlier, have this kind of symmetry, as do some plants like orchid flowers.
It's a lot like the rotational
symmetry
of the triangle we watched earlier.
But when it occurs in animals, this kind of
symmetry
is known as radial
symmetry.
For instance, some sea urchins and starfish have pentaradial or five-fold symmetry, that is,
symmetry
with respect to rotations of 72 degrees around their center.
This
symmetry
also appears in plants, as you can see for yourself by slicing through an apple horizontally.
Some corals, on the other hand, have no
symmetry
at all.
Does body
symmetry
tell us anything about an animal's lifestyle?
Having a head leads naturally to the development of bilateral
symmetry.
For instance, we saw that starfish and sea urchins have five-fold
symmetry.
For biologists, this is strong evidence that we're more closely related to starfish than we are, to say, corals, or other animals that don't exhibit bilateral
symmetry
at any stage in their development.
Thinking about something as simple as body
symmetry
can help us dig far into our evolutionary past and understand where we, as a species, have come from.
Symmetry
is everywhere in nature, and we usually associate it with beauty: a perfectly shaped leaf, or a butterfly with intricate patterns mirrored on each wing.
So while
symmetry
may be beautiful, asymmetry holds an allure of its own, found in its graceful whirls, its organized complexity, and its striking imperfections.
Counting on symmetry, you replicate these piles again with the colors rearranged.
One of those clocks is going to slow down and die before the other and it's going to alter the
symmetry
of the artwork."
You can discern the book, and you can see how it disrupted the
symmetry
of the bricks directly above it, but by the time you get to the end of the sculpture, you can no longer see the book.
These include averaging,
symmetry
and the effects of hormones.
The second factor that contributes to beauty is
symmetry.
Symmetry, it turns out, is also an indicator of health.
In the 1930s, a man named Maksymilian Faktorowicz recognized the importance of
symmetry
for beauty when he designed the beauty micrometer.
The Higgs, over here on the left, has a large mass and breaks the
symmetry
of this electroweak pattern.
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