Mathematics and the Aesthetic

Mathematics and the Aesthetic PDF Author: Nathalie Sinclair
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387381457
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of essays explores the ancient affinity between the mathematical and the aesthetic, focusing on fundamental connections between these two modes of reasoning and communicating. From historical, philosophical and psychological perspectives, with particular attention to certain mathematical areas such as geometry and analysis, the authors examine ways in which the aesthetic is ever-present in mathematical thinking and contributes to the growth and value of mathematical knowledge.

Mathematics and the Aesthetic

Mathematics and the Aesthetic PDF Author: Nathalie Sinclair
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387381457
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of essays explores the ancient affinity between the mathematical and the aesthetic, focusing on fundamental connections between these two modes of reasoning and communicating. From historical, philosophical and psychological perspectives, with particular attention to certain mathematical areas such as geometry and analysis, the authors examine ways in which the aesthetic is ever-present in mathematical thinking and contributes to the growth and value of mathematical knowledge.

Explaining Beauty in Mathematics: An Aesthetic Theory of Mathematics

Explaining Beauty in Mathematics: An Aesthetic Theory of Mathematics PDF Author: Ulianov Montano
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3319034529
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
This book develops a naturalistic aesthetic theory that accounts for aesthetic phenomena in mathematics in the same terms as it accounts for more traditional aesthetic phenomena. Building upon a view advanced by James McAllister, the assertion is that beauty in science does not confine itself to anecdotes or personal idiosyncrasies, but rather that it had played a role in shaping the development of science. Mathematicians often evaluate certain pieces of mathematics using words like beautiful, elegant, or even ugly. Such evaluations are prevalent, however, rigorous investigation of them, of mathematical beauty, is much less common. The volume integrates the basic elements of aesthetics, as it has been developed over the last 200 years, with recent findings in neuropsychology as well as a good knowledge of mathematics. The volume begins with a discussion of the reasons to interpret mathematical beauty in a literal or non-literal fashion, which also serves to survey historical and contemporary approaches to mathematical beauty. The author concludes that literal approaches are much more coherent and fruitful, however, much is yet to be done. In this respect two chapters are devoted to the revision and improvement of McAllister’s theory of the role of beauty in science. These antecedents are used as a foundation to formulate a naturalistic aesthetic theory. The central idea of the theory is that aesthetic phenomena should be seen as constituting a complex dynamical system which the author calls the aesthetic as process theory. The theory comprises explications of three central topics: aesthetic experience (in mathematics), aesthetic value and aesthetic judgment. The theory is applied in the final part of the volume and is used to account for the three most salient and often used aesthetic terms often used in mathematics: beautiful, elegant and ugly. This application of the theory serves to illustrate the theory in action, but also to further discuss and develop some details and to showcase the theory’s explanatory capabilities.

Mathematics and Beauty

Mathematics and Beauty PDF Author: Nathalie Sinclair
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book

Book Description
In this innovative book, Nathalie Sinclair makes a compelling case for the inclusion of the aesthetic in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Using a provocative set of philosophical, psychological, mathematical, technological, and educational insights, she illuminates how the materials and approaches we use in the mathematics classroom can be enriched for the benefit of all learners. While ranging in scope from the young learner to the professional mathematician, there is a particular focus on middle school, where negative feelings toward mathematics frequently begin. Offering specific recommendations to help teachers evoke and nurture their students’ aesthetic abilities, this book: Features powerful episodes from the classroom that show students in the act of developing a sense of mathematical aesthetics. Analyzes how aesthetic sensibilities to qualities such as connectedness, fruitfulness, apparent simplicity, visual appeal, and surprise are fundamental to mathematical inquiry. Includes examples of mathematical inquiry in computer-based learning environments, revealing some of the roles they play in supporting students’ aesthetic inclinations.

Amazing and Aesthetic Aspects of Analysis

Amazing and Aesthetic Aspects of Analysis PDF Author: Paul Loya
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1493967959
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 730

Get Book

Book Description
Lively prose and imaginative exercises draw the reader into this unique introductory real analysis textbook. Motivating the fundamental ideas and theorems that underpin real analysis with historical remarks and well-chosen quotes, the author shares his enthusiasm for the subject throughout. A student reading this book is invited not only to acquire proficiency in the fundamentals of analysis, but to develop an appreciation for abstraction and the language of its expression. In studying this book, students will encounter: the interconnections between set theory and mathematical statements and proofs; the fundamental axioms of the natural, integer, and real numbers; rigorous ε-N and ε-δ definitions; convergence and properties of an infinite series, product, or continued fraction; series, product, and continued fraction formulæ for the various elementary functions and constants. Instructors will appreciate this engaging perspective, showcasing the beauty of these fundamental results.

Beautiful Mathematics

Beautiful Mathematics PDF Author: Martin Erickson
Publisher: MAA
ISBN: 0883855763
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book

Book Description
Mathematical ideas with aesthetic appeal for any mathematically minded person.

The Mathematical Imagination

The Mathematical Imagination PDF Author: Matthew Handelman
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823283852
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present.

Aesthetics of Interdisciplinarity: Art and Mathematics

Aesthetics of Interdisciplinarity: Art and Mathematics PDF Author: Kristóf Fenyvesi
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3319572598
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
This anthology fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue between the mathematical and artistic approaches in the field where mathematical and artistic thinking and practice merge. The articles included highlight the most significant current ideas and phenomena, providing a multifaceted and extensive snapshot of the field and indicating how interdisciplinary approaches are applied in the research of various cultural and artistic phenomena. The discussions are related, for example, to the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, art history, art theory, artistic practice, cultural studies, ethno-mathematics, geometry, mathematics, new physics, philosophy, physics, study of visual illusions, and symmetry studies. Further, the book introduces a new concept: the interdisciplinary aesthetics of mathematical art, which the editors use to explain the manifold nature of the aesthetic principles intertwined in these discussions.

Mathematics and Art

Mathematics and Art PDF Author: Lynn Gamwell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165289
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Math Art

Math Art PDF Author: Stephen Ornes
Publisher: Sterling New York
ISBN: 9781454930440
Category : MATHEMATICS
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
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.

The Weil Conjectures

The Weil Conjectures PDF Author: Karen Olsson
Publisher:
ISBN: 1526607549
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book

Book Description
'Beguiling ... Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge' New York Times Simone Weil- philosopher, political activist, mystic o and sister to Andr , one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. These two extraordinary siblings formed an obsession for Karen Olsson, who studied mathematics at Harvard, only to turn to writing as a vocation. When Olsson got hold of the 1940 letters between the siblings, she found they shared a curiosity about the inception of creative thought o that flash of insight o that Olsson experienced as both a maths student, and later, novelist. Following this thread of connections, The Weil Conjectures explores the lives of Simone and Andr , the lore and allure of mathematics, and its significance in Olsson's own life.