Ever since Pythagoras hatched a ‘little scheme’ to invent a set of rules describing the entire universe, scientists and mathematicians have tried to seek order in the cosmos: Euclid, who in 300BC defined the nature of space; Descartes, a fourteenth-century gambler and idler who invented the graph; Gauss, the fifteen-year-old genius who discovered that space is curved; Einstein, who added time to the equation; and Witten, who ushered in today’s weird new world of extra, twisted dimensions.