It was the beauty of the periodic table of elements that first inspired Philip Stewart to study chemistry. Butitwasn't the boxy periodic table usually found in chemistry classrooms that caught his attention, it was an artist's rendering of the periodic table at the South Kensington Science Exhibition at the Festival of Britain in 1951. The artist, Edgar Longman, represented the elements in a swirling arrangement that gave the chart a galactic feel (Figure 1a). Stewart, now a lecturer in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford, decided to recreate that feel in his own artistic version of the periodic table, which depicts the elements in a cosmic swirl, connected by wisps of interstellar cloud (Figure 1b).
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