In the grand scheme of things nature is much bigger in comparison to the individual. Nonetheless, man has found it irresistible to try to prove his superiority. A lost cause. Our ego is always searching for divine patterns; from the bible thumpers like Harold Camping to artists like DaVinci and even Jackson Pollock, or a Carl Jung; there seems to be an innate need to establish that we are the superior part of nature. Which means that nature is divisible and has a hierarchy.Intentionally or not, artists constantly borrow from the patterns that make up the natural world.In each Each effort to create art, we recreate nature ourselves , albeit on a miniature scale. It is as if by attempting to reproduce it we are somehow able, futilely to master it.The question then is of chicken an egg proportions: Is art a product of the individual or of nature? Is nature the art or the artist?
There has always been a long standing affinity between the mathematical and the aesthetic going back to ancient times. These two modes of reasoning and communicating have contributed to the growth of both fields; the aesthetic is always present in mathematical thinking and contributes to the growth of mathematical knowledge. The golden ratio. The irrational number 1.618. Who would have foreseen that such an innocuous number discovered by Euclid would end up having implications for numerous natural phenomena ranging from the leaf and seed arrangements of plants to the structure of the crystals of some metal alloys, and from the arts to the financial analysis of stocks and bonds.
The Golden Ratio got its name due to its constant involvement in beauty and perfection, hence it is also called the Divine Ratio. Interestingly, most objects that humans deem aesthetically pleasing, adhere to the Golden Ratio.Even in everyday life, humans compare what they see to an ingrained yet subconscious Golden Ratio. This is where we get the notion of “mathematical beauty”. In a mathematically beautiful face, every proportion from the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and in-between, matches up perfectly to the Golden Ratio.
Many books claim that if you draw a rectangle around the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the ratio of the height to width of that rectangle is equal to the Golden Ratio. No factual basis exists to indicate that Leonardo consciously used the Golden Ratio in the Mona Lisa’s composition, nor to where precisely the rectangle should be drawn. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge the fact that Leonardo was a close personal friend of Luca Pacioli, who published a three-volume treatise on the Golden Ratio in 1509 entitled Divina Proportione, and it is possible Botticelli was also familiar with this work.
—Does the unconscious play a part in maths, too? “I’m sure it does,” Carla says, “though it’s hard to express how exactly; I’m not a psychologist. It’s the place from where we all bring our ideas. I think there is a connection between dreams and maths. Dreams have their own logic, that doesn’t immediately make sense. In mathematics, too, we use many different types of logic, sometimes counterintuitive ones….”This reminds me of another picture in the exhibition, Caravaggio by John Trobaugh…. ( Image removed by request)
…It’s about taking body pieces and attaching them to parts of the body where they don’t belong. This is something that could happen in a dream, but it’s also very systematic: taking things apart, permuting them and reassembling them in a different order, is something we do in maths a lot. Both maths and dreams allow us to break the boundaries of reality. Maybe it’s all about expressing the infinite world we have inside of us, and which in our real life can only come out in finitely many ways.” Read More:http://plus.maths.org/content/artmathx
ads/2011/05/goldman1.jpg" alt="" width="486" height="648" />