Friday, February 24, 2012

1+1=beauty

I just read John Green's new book, The Fault In Our Stars. While I was reading it, I also happened to watch a cool video by Salman Khan called The Beauty of Algebra. In addition, my son is studying M.C. Escher in art. This combination  has me thinking a lot about the mathematical beauty of the universe.


Check out these two videos by Spanish filmmaker Cristobal Vila, Nature by Numbers and Inspirations. See if you can find beauty in the Fibonacci Series and Spiral, the Golden and Angle Ratios, or the Delauney Triangulation.




INSPIRATIONS from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

M.C. Escher (1898-1972) was the Dutch artist who explored a wide range of mathematical ideas with his woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. I fell in love with his work at a gallery showing at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Although Escher had no formal training in mathematics beyond secondary school, many mathematicians counted themselves as admirers of his work. (Visit this online gallery to get better acquainted with Escher’s art, and be sure to click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images). As Vila explains, Inspirations tries to imagine Escher’s workplace, “what things would surround an artist like him, so deeply interested in science in general and mathematics in particular.” This video is three minutes of unbridled imagination.

1 comment:

  1. Amazing, I had no idea. He LOVED his work. :-)
    ps
    I would have guessed, it's done with a computer!

    ReplyDelete