Books &Mathematics Entropy | 22 Mar 2011
The Art of Mathematics
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.– G.H. Hardy
A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form- By Paul Lockhart
The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art. The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. Everyone understands that poets, painters, and musicians create works of art, and are expressing themselves in word, image, and sound. In fact, our society is rather generous when it comes to creative expression; architects, chefs, and even television directors are considered to be working artists. So why not mathematicians?
Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood. – Paul Lockhart,
A manifesto for freeing math from the drudgery of traditional teaching by a brilliant mathematician.
This brief and elegant celebration of mathematics is a charming rant against the way you and I learned the subject. Is painting just coloring in numbered regions? Is the sunset just a list of wavelengths and a compass setting ?
on 22 Mar 2011 at 11:04 pm 1.Michele said …
Even though all of this is very poetic I have to beg to differ;
Mathematics is free of most personal interpretations,
whereas Art is each individual’s own interpretation…
on 23 Mar 2011 at 11:06 am 2.Entropy said …
Hi ! Michele
I think you are absolutely correct in your opinion – Thanks for sharing
on 22 May 2012 at 11:54 am 3.Elise said …
I beg to differ. Personal interpretations enter into math all the time. For a famous example, look into the over two thousand year quest by mathematicians to prove the parallel postulate.
The Calculus, too, is riddled with examples of personal interpretation. Indeed, the relatively recent subject of Analysis came into being while trying to expunge such. :)