Art In The Life Of Mathematicians

Why are mathematicians drawn to art? How do they perceive it? What motivates them to pursue excellence in music or painting? Do they view their art as a conveyance for their mathematics or an escape from it? What are the similarities between mathematical talent and creativity and their artistic equivalents? What are the differences? Can a theatrical play or a visual image capture the beauty and excitement of mathematics? Some of the world's top mathematicians are also accomplished artists: musicians, photographers, painters, dancers, writers, filmmakers. In this volume, they share some of their work and reflect on the roles that mathematics and art have played in their lives. They write about creativity, communication, making connections, negotiating successes and failures, and navigating the vastly different professional worlds of art and mathematics.

The worlds of visual art and mathematics beautifully unite in this spectacular volume by award-winning writer Stephen Ornes. He explores the growing sensation of math art, presenting such pieces as a colorful crocheted representation of non-Euclidian geometry that looks like sea coral and a 65-ton, 28-foot-tall bronze sculpture covered in a space-filling curve. We learn the artist's story for every work, plus the mathematical concepts and equations behind the art.

Art and science are not separate universes. This book explores this claim by showing how mathematics, geometry and numerical approaches contribute to the construction of works of art. This applies not only to modern visual artists but also to important artists of the past. To illustrate this, this book studies Leonardo da Vinci, who was both an engineer and a painter, and whose paintings can be perfectly modeled using simple geometric curves. The world gains intelligibility through elegant mathematical frameworks – from the projective spaces of painting to the most complex phase spaces of theoretical physics. A living example of this interdisciplinarity would be the sculptures of Jean Letourneur, a specialist in both chaos sciences and carving, as evidenced in his stonework. This book also exemplifies the geometry and life of forms through contemporary works of art – including fractal art – which have never before been represented in this type of work.

This is a cultural history of mathematics and art, from antiquity to the present. Mathematicians and artists have long been on a quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. Taking readers on a tour of the practice of mathematics and the philosophical ideas that drive the discipline, Lynn Gamwell points out the important ways mathematical concepts have been expressed by artists. Sumptuous illustrations of artworks and cogent math diagrams are featured in Gamwell's comprehensive exploration. Gamwell begins by describing mathematics from antiquity to the Enlightenment, including Greek, Islamic, and Asian mathematics. Then focusing on modern culture, Gamwell traces mathematicians' search for the foundations of their science, such as David Hilbert's conception of mathematics as an arrangement of meaning-free signs, as well as artists' search for the essence of their craft, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's monochrome paintings. She shows that self-reflection is inherent to the practice of both modern mathematics and art, and that this introspection points to a deep resonance between the two fields: Kurt Gödel posed questions about the nature of mathematics in the language of mathematics and Jasper Johns asked "What is art?" in the vocabulary of art. Throughout, Gamwell describes the personalities and cultural environments of a multitude of mathematicians and artists, from Gottlob Frege and Benoît Mandelbrot to Max Bill and Xu Bing. Mathematics and Art demonstrates how mathematical ideas are embodied in the visual arts and will enlighten all who are interested in the complex intellectual pursuits, personalities, and cultural settings that connect these vast disciplines.

A brilliant tour of mathematical thought and a guide to becoming a better thinker, How Not to Be Wrong shows that math is not just a long list of rules to be learned and carried out by rote. Math touches everything we do; It's what makes the world make sense. Using the mathematician's methods and hard-won insights-minus the jargon-professor and popular columnist Jordan Ellenberg guides general readers through his ideas with rigor and lively irreverence, infusing everything from election results to baseball to the existence of God and the psychology of slime molds with a heightened sense of clarity and wonder. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see the hidden structures beneath the messy and chaotic surface of our daily lives. How Not to Be Wrong shows us how--Publisher's description.

An undergraduate textbook devoted exclusively to relationships between mathematics and art, Viewpoints is ideally suited for math-for-liberal-arts courses and mathematics courses for fine arts majors. The textbook contains a wide variety of classroom-tested activities and problems, a series of essays by contemporary artists written especially for the book, and a plethora of pedagogical and learning opportunities for instructors and students. Viewpoints focuses on two mathematical areas: perspective related to drawing man-made forms and fractal geometry related to drawing natural forms. Investigating facets of the three-dimensional world in order to understand mathematical concepts behind the art, the textbook explores art topics including comic, anamorphic, and classical art, as well as photography, while presenting such mathematical ideas as proportion, ratio, self-similarity, exponents, and logarithms. Straightforward problems and rewarding solutions empower students to make accurate, sophisticated drawings. Personal essays and short biographies by contemporary artists are interspersed between chapters and are accompanied by images of their work. These fine artists--who include mathematicians and scientists--examine how mathematics influences their art. Accessible to students of all levels, Viewpoints encourages experimentation and collaboration, and captures the essence of artistic and mathematical creation and discovery. Classroom-tested activities and problem solving Accessible problems that move beyond regular art school curriculum Multiple solutions of varying difficulty and applicability Appropriate for students of all mathematics and art levels Original and exclusive essays by contemporary artists Forthcoming: Instructor's manual (available only to teachers)

Fully illustrated, this story brings together the histories of arts and mathematics and shows how infinity at last acquired a precise mathematical meaning.