nobel prize for chemistry is pretty cool this year, if i understand it correctly he has proven that complex partial symmetries exists inside the regular symmetries.

DANIEL Shechtman of Israel has won the 2011 Nobel Chemistry Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, the Nobel jury says.

His research "has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter," the jury said today.

Read more: Israeli wins Nobel Chemistry prize | News.com.au
crystals, according to the classical crystallographic restriction theorem, can possess only 2, 3, 4, and 6-fold rotational symmetries, the Bragg diffraction pattern of quasicrystals shows sharp peaks with other symmetry orders, for instance 5-fold.

Although 20th-century physicists were surprised by the discovery of quasicrystals, their mathematical descriptions were already well established. For example, tiles in a medieval Islamic mosque in Isfahan, Iran, are arranged in a quasicrystalline pattern, suggesting that their designers achieved a mathematical breakthrough 500 years earlier than Western scholars.
^from wiki