http://ift.tt/2cuzlcf We know embarrassingly little about the symmetries of the roots of all polynomials with rational coefficients, or if you prefer, the absolute Galois group $Gal(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb{Q})$. In the title picture the roots of polynomials of degree $\leq 4$ with small coefficients are plotted and coloured by degree: blue=4, cyan=3, red=2, green=1. Sums and products of roots are again roots and by a symmetry we mean a map on all roots, sending sums to sums and products to products and leaving all the green dots (the rational numbers) fixed. John Baez has an excellent post on the beauty of roots , including a picture of all polynomials of degree $\leq 5$ with integer coefficients between $-4$ and $4$ and, this time, colour-coded by: grey=2, cyan=3, red=4 and black=5. In both pictures there’s a hint of the unit circle, black in the title picture and spanning the ‘white gaps’ in the picture above. If we’d only consider the sub-picture of all (sums and produc...
