You know, if I wear my glasses in a way that they are completely tilted, you will really have a hard time sitting with me for a long time. So occasionally, for example, especially in 20th century art, when they actually want indeed to surprise us or to shock us, they especially, you know, get away from symmetry.

It's almost like they're drawn to it it's almost then within our DNA, our artistic DNA. NORRIS: I wonder if artists instinctively try to achieve this. I must say, I find myself that as I grow older, I like things to be a little bit more predictable than I used to when I was younger. So, right, so that's the element of surprise, indeed. NORRIS: And the surprise in his music, in Mozart's music, in fact, writers often refer to it as the Mozart effect, doing exactly the opposite of what you expect the artist to do. We definitely don't like to be surprised all the time. I mean, We don't like it to be completely predictable. It turns out that the music we like best, in all forms of music, not just classical music, is of the type that is kind of in the middle between, you know, being predictable and, and being surprising. NORRIS: The symmetry, does that explain why certain kinds of music, certain forms of music are pleasing to our ear? You know, they both did all their best work, you know, when they were teenagers, essentially. And this is what happened with Mozart, or it happened with a number of mathematicians like the French Evariste Galois who, you know, Mozart died at 35, Evariste died at 20. You can, you know, just know a little bit about this, and with the talent that you have, you can immediately generate breakthroughs. It appears that both in music and in mathematics, you know, you don't need to read entire encyclopedias before you become creative. Similarly, there are many prodigies in mathematics who do their best work, you know, when they are extraordinarily young. You know, Mozart was, of course, a prodigy. LIVIO: We don't know that, of course, but we are aware of the fact that there are some connections between talent in music and in mathematics. NORRIS: What explains Mozart's total fascination with symmetry? In fact, in most, I would say, you see this. NORRIS: And so, when you listen to something like Symphony #40, and you sort of pull the lens back and look at the entire composition, you start to see all kinds of symmetry in different forms and different ways. So you see precisely that symmetry where something is coming down and then going up in precisely the same way. You know, like a snowflake that you rotate looks the same, sometimes when you look at the score of his music, it looks a bit like, if you take the letter S and turn it on its side. It's not just the symmetry that I indicated, the one of like a wall pattern. There is one piece where he actually calculates the probability of winning the lottery in the margin of the music. You also see, occasionally he writes numbers, you know, at the margin of the pieces of music. And in his music, you see, indeed, all these symmetries. But, you know, his sister, Nanneril, said that when he was a kid at school he could talk about nothing else other than numbers, and he filled the walls of their house with numbers. Did that inform his music, or was it actually quite the opposite? NORRIS: Mozart was fascinated with Mathematics. We call this symmetry under translation, which means you move from place to place, you see the same thing. So, you know, he changes one note, or he moves a half a note up or down, you know, and so on.

Sometimes, you know, it's changed a little bit not to make this boring. Here you wait a little bit, and you hear the same pattern again. You know, where you walk a certain distance and you see the same pattern again. So this is the same type of symmetry you would see in maybe wallpaper design. And then the same thing repeats itself twice. MARIO LIVIO (Author and Astrophysicist): So, you notice that, you know, it goes up and then down, and then up again in the same way, and down again in the same way. And when he listens to Mozart, he hears the language of symmetry. But what makes Mozart's music so special? Why does great music endure? It's our way of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth. You may have noticed that we heard a lot of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during our program. I'm Melissa Block.ДЄnd I'm Michele Norris. From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

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