Mathematical beauty

Mathematical beauty describes the notion that some mathematicians may derive aesthetic pleasure from their work, and from mathematics in general.

See also Mathematics and art.

Description

They express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as beautiful.

Mathematicians describe mathematics as an art form or, at a minimum, as a creative activity.

Comparisons are often made with music and poetry.

Bertrand Russell expressed his sense of mathematical beauty:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Paul Erdős expressed his views on the ineffability of mathematics when he said:

Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

Examples

Various contributors to math.stackexchange.com answer the question:

What was the first bit of mathematics that made you realize that math is beautiful? (For children's book)

• Pascal's triangle
• Fibonacci numbers
• Prime numbers and colored boxes
• You can always divide something by two; magnify glass non-Euclidean geometry
• Frogs and recursion
• Naughty 37
• Magic squares
• Archimedes' method for computing areas and volumes
• Bean machine
• Pi
• Golden ratio
• Fractals
• Realising why zero is not nothing
• Mandelbrot set

See also

• Art
• Fibonacci sequence
• Mathematics
• Mathematics and art
• Pascal's triangle

External links

• Mathematical beauty @ Wikipedia