Abstract: Magic angles are a hot topic in condensed matter physics: when two sheets of graphene are twisted by those angles the resulting material is superconducting. I will present a very simple operator whose spectral properties are thought to determine which angles are magical. It comes from a 2019 PR Letter by Tarnopolsky--Kruchkov--Vishwanath. The mathematics behind this is an elementary blend of representation theory (of the Heisenberg group in characteristic three), Jacobi theta functions and
spectral instability of non-self-adjoint operators (involving Hörmander's bracket condition in a very simple setting). Recent mathematical progress also includes the proof of existence of generalized magic
angles and computer assisted proofs of existence of real ones (Luskin--Watson, 2021). The results will be illustrated by colourful numerics which suggest many open problems (joint work with M Embree, J Wittsten, M Zworski 2020 and T Humbert, M Zworski 2022).