From the complexity of the snowflake, to the London tube map and the spiralling Andromeda galaxy, imagery has always been a vitally important ingredient of science. This week, Plus talks to John Barrow, professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and author of the new book Cosmic Imagery, about the images that have changed science, and how we have viewed science, over the centuries.

To download this enhanced podcast to your computer and for playing on your MP4 player, right-click on the link below on a PC and ctrl-click it on a Mac.

http://plus.maths.org/podcasts/PlusEnhancedBarrow.mp4

Image credits

• Waterfall, lithograph by M.C. Escher's © 2008 The M.C. Escher Company, Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
• Cover of Fantastic Universe created by Alex Schomburg.
• All images of the Mandelbrot set created by Wolfgang Beyer, reproduced under the GNU Free Documentation License.
• All images of historic dice courtesy Arjan Verweij.
• The animated Klein bottle was created by Konrad Polthier.
• The tiling of three-dimensional hyperbolic space was created by Charles Gunn of the Technische Universität Berlin. It is a still from the movie Not Knot!, published by A K Peters Ltd.