art is often seen as an overly
melancholic field of occupation built
solely on emotions where Smith – most
people appears as a dry technical field
that only requires computation and no
creative thinking in fact both math and
art require vivid imagination and send
closer together than is popularly
believed of course you can paint
mathematic ideas and analyze paintings
through math but the to share something
more than simply each other’s analytical
applicability both mathematics and art
discover patterns in the real world
turned them into abstract
representations and create ways of
applying these representations back to
reality for the sake of its betterment
my personal interest in the link between
math and art started from a rather
discouraging anti example in one of the
many math courses I have taken
throughout my academic career I wanted
to do a quiz it consisted of a single
task to build a graph of a function in
order to do that you had to follow nine
steps to solve nine many problems
it wasn’t really my day then and
somewhere in the middle I got confused
so the graph of course did not look
right but honestly I treated it the way
I treated everything in math and in life
as a piece of art so I colored it in
glittering pens as I would do with an
artwork and week later when we got the
results there was a single command next
to the graph which sounded almost like a
verdict too much imagination at the time
I got a good laugh out of it and I’m
sure the person who graded the quizzes
had even more fun but it left me with a
bitter impression that imagination is
often perceived to be distant from or
boldly
incompatible with mathematics a
conviction I by no means share so today
I will try to show you the
the link between math and art in the
mind work of artists and mathematicians
in the abstract formulas they create and
in the tools they used to do so the very
first intersection between math and art
is introduced to us in primary schools
as we are taught to look for geometric
shapes in artwork but as we grow the
visual content we are exposed to gets
more and more intricate and to analyze
such complex visuals Henrik Jensen from
the Imperial College London has
suggested to use fractals now in math a
fractal is an abstract model which is
used to simulate a natural object
whereby a detail of this object is
taking and repeated to create a general
pattern that reflects the structure of
the whole in other words the most
important characteristic of a fractal is
its self similarity perhaps the most
vivid example of the fractal would be
the sierpinski triangle you can see it’s
made out of little triangles so it’s
self similar in this way generally
because of the consistency of geometric
figures it is very easy to recognize
them even though you may be given just a
few details and artists often engage
with the viewers imagination this way by
creating ordered and unordered areas of
patterns the very first example of an
artwork like this I could think of was
in fact my own I did it about five years
ago so long before I discovered the link
between fractals and art and here you
can see the smaller leave like shapes
filling the big reliefs with the overall
picture being like that highly
ornamental but the artists objective
might be exactly the opposite for
example to hide the bigger picture from
you by filling it with shapes and
representative of the central object
here I try to hide the face in the main
of the line behind them typical shapes
and a symbolic landscape sometimes an
overly ornamental artist will have some
mercy as to give their viewer central
point around which to assemble the areas
of patterns so you can see the bigger
picture
here such point is the eyes and if you
do not assemble the face right away
don’t worry it even took me some time
after I do this but I actually prefer to
get lost in artwork and not to see any
bigger picture whatsoever
the conceptual similarity between art
and math can be further seen in the
abstract formulas that are created to
represent the world sometimes it takes
an artist month or even years in certain
cases to put together all the elements
of a successful art formula and those
can be psychology cultural studies
politics and sometimes even legal
studies all to create a viable act of
visual communication similarly in math
if you do not substitute the right
variables with the right numbers the
formula will simply not work and in
order to do that correctly you need to
pull together all your knowledge from
in art and graphic design we use the
formula of the so called three FS to
evaluate visuals the three F stand for
form feeling and function and it means
that a good piece of art and graphic
design will have the overall form that
allows for an effective expression of
the intended message while also evoking
a certain planned emotional response and
conveying the overall function whatever
it might be may be a call to action or
an expression of empathy so if we can
assess art this way let’s try to
evaluate some math according to the same
principle taking the formula of I
squared equals 2 minus 1 where I is an
email
number you can see that the formula only
has the required components and that it
conveys the overall message that the
principle square root of -1 will be I
now this formula does not openly convey
the the initial confusion that the
audience might have that is square
number mains I could be negative but
some math concepts do convey emotions in
a very open manner Benoit Mandelbrot who
coined the form the term fractal first
described it like this beautiful damn
heart and increasingly useful adding an
almost poetic touch to fractals
lastly math and art have been largely
integrated in the field of technology to
the point where even colors can be
expressed in numerical values digital
artists and graphic designers do not
simply pick a color from a digital
palette they build it instead and they
do it by defining the ratios of four
based colors which are cyan magenta
yellow and black and these colors can
form any imaginable color so let’s take
18% cyan which is the color of the
letters on the screen then eight 28%
magenta which is the color you can see
now 0% yellow the color does not change
and finally 15% black and like this you
can get the light pastel purple in
Photoshop for example considering also
that every visual effect in illustration
and graphic design software can be
expressed mathematically one may wonder
if after a day of designing digital
masterpieces an amazed viewer should
tell you oh you’re such an artist or
actually all you’re such a mathematician
likewise having spent hours and hours
solving math problems in a way similar
to this by Leonardo da Vinci it would
make perfect sense for you to hear that
your math is rather RC or utterly
beautiful
especially given how much imagination it
takes to derive every math formula and
how much logical elegancy it takes to
use one this similarities between math
and art are not so easy to see as a
result the language of math often
appears less intelligible than the
language of art but we can try to
interpret between the two it is true
that this talk reflects my greater
exposure to the fields of art and
graphic design than to the field of math
due to the nature of my studies and work
but I believe it is important to start a
conversation between the two fields that
are so wrongfully considered to be so
far apart
I hope this talk inspires some more love
for math and some more understanding of
the technicalities of art and I hope
that by pointing out how conceptually
similar meth and art are I have managed
to at least a little bit decrease the
ideological rivalry between
mathematicians and artists in principle
as well as math majors and social
science majors on campus and if we teach
math the way we teach art and if we
sometimes teach art the way we teach
math maybe we can all just profoundly enjoy both thank you
melancholic field of occupation built
solely on emotions where Smith – most
people appears as a dry technical field
that only requires computation and no
creative thinking in fact both math and
art require vivid imagination and send
closer together than is popularly
believed of course you can paint
mathematic ideas and analyze paintings
through math but the to share something
more than simply each other’s analytical
applicability both mathematics and art
discover patterns in the real world
turned them into abstract
representations and create ways of
applying these representations back to
reality for the sake of its betterment
my personal interest in the link between
math and art started from a rather
discouraging anti example in one of the
many math courses I have taken
throughout my academic career I wanted
to do a quiz it consisted of a single
task to build a graph of a function in
order to do that you had to follow nine
steps to solve nine many problems
it wasn’t really my day then and
somewhere in the middle I got confused
so the graph of course did not look
right but honestly I treated it the way
I treated everything in math and in life
as a piece of art so I colored it in
glittering pens as I would do with an
artwork and week later when we got the
results there was a single command next
to the graph which sounded almost like a
verdict too much imagination at the time
I got a good laugh out of it and I’m
sure the person who graded the quizzes
had even more fun but it left me with a
bitter impression that imagination is
often perceived to be distant from or
boldly
incompatible with mathematics a
conviction I by no means share so today
I will try to show you the
the link between math and art in the
mind work of artists and mathematicians
in the abstract formulas they create and
in the tools they used to do so the very
first intersection between math and art
is introduced to us in primary schools
as we are taught to look for geometric
shapes in artwork but as we grow the
visual content we are exposed to gets
more and more intricate and to analyze
such complex visuals Henrik Jensen from
the Imperial College London has
suggested to use fractals now in math a
fractal is an abstract model which is
used to simulate a natural object
whereby a detail of this object is
taking and repeated to create a general
pattern that reflects the structure of
the whole in other words the most
important characteristic of a fractal is
its self similarity perhaps the most
vivid example of the fractal would be
the sierpinski triangle you can see it’s
made out of little triangles so it’s
self similar in this way generally
because of the consistency of geometric
figures it is very easy to recognize
them even though you may be given just a
few details and artists often engage
with the viewers imagination this way by
creating ordered and unordered areas of
patterns the very first example of an
artwork like this I could think of was
in fact my own I did it about five years
ago so long before I discovered the link
between fractals and art and here you
can see the smaller leave like shapes
filling the big reliefs with the overall
picture being like that highly
ornamental but the artists objective
might be exactly the opposite for
example to hide the bigger picture from
you by filling it with shapes and
representative of the central object
here I try to hide the face in the main
of the line behind them typical shapes
and a symbolic landscape sometimes an
overly ornamental artist will have some
mercy as to give their viewer central
point around which to assemble the areas
of patterns so you can see the bigger
picture
here such point is the eyes and if you
do not assemble the face right away
don’t worry it even took me some time
after I do this but I actually prefer to
get lost in artwork and not to see any
bigger picture whatsoever
the conceptual similarity between art
and math can be further seen in the
abstract formulas that are created to
represent the world sometimes it takes
an artist month or even years in certain
cases to put together all the elements
of a successful art formula and those
can be psychology cultural studies
politics and sometimes even legal
studies all to create a viable act of
visual communication similarly in math
if you do not substitute the right
variables with the right numbers the
formula will simply not work and in
order to do that correctly you need to
pull together all your knowledge from
in art and graphic design we use the
formula of the so called three FS to
evaluate visuals the three F stand for
form feeling and function and it means
that a good piece of art and graphic
design will have the overall form that
allows for an effective expression of
the intended message while also evoking
a certain planned emotional response and
conveying the overall function whatever
it might be may be a call to action or
an expression of empathy so if we can
assess art this way let’s try to
evaluate some math according to the same
principle taking the formula of I
squared equals 2 minus 1 where I is an
number you can see that the formula only
has the required components and that it
conveys the overall message that the
principle square root of -1 will be I
now this formula does not openly convey
the the initial confusion that the
audience might have that is square
number mains I could be negative but
some math concepts do convey emotions in
a very open manner Benoit Mandelbrot who
coined the form the term fractal first
described it like this beautiful damn
heart and increasingly useful adding an
almost poetic touch to fractals
lastly math and art have been largely
integrated in the field of technology to
the point where even colors can be
expressed in numerical values digital
artists and graphic designers do not
simply pick a color from a digital
palette they build it instead and they
do it by defining the ratios of four
based colors which are cyan magenta
yellow and black and these colors can
form any imaginable color so let’s take
18% cyan which is the color of the
letters on the screen then eight 28%
magenta which is the color you can see
now 0% yellow the color does not change
and finally 15% black and like this you
can get the light pastel purple in
Photoshop for example considering also
that every visual effect in illustration
and graphic design software can be
expressed mathematically one may wonder
if after a day of designing digital
masterpieces an amazed viewer should
tell you oh you’re such an artist or
actually all you’re such a mathematician
likewise having spent hours and hours
solving math problems in a way similar
to this by Leonardo da Vinci it would
make perfect sense for you to hear that
your math is rather RC or utterly
beautiful
especially given how much imagination it
takes to derive every math formula and
how much logical elegancy it takes to
use one this similarities between math
and art are not so easy to see as a
result the language of math often
appears less intelligible than the
language of art but we can try to
interpret between the two it is true
that this talk reflects my greater
exposure to the fields of art and
graphic design than to the field of math
due to the nature of my studies and work
but I believe it is important to start a
conversation between the two fields that
are so wrongfully considered to be so
far apart
I hope this talk inspires some more love
for math and some more understanding of
the technicalities of art and I hope
that by pointing out how conceptually
similar meth and art are I have managed
to at least a little bit decrease the
ideological rivalry between
mathematicians and artists in principle
as well as math majors and social
science majors on campus and if we teach
math the way we teach art and if we
sometimes teach art the way we teach
math maybe we can all just profoundly enjoy both thank you
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