Art, science, mathematics
Background
I have long been interested in connections between mathematics, philosophy, and literature. My first exposure to this pursuit began when I studied the work of Jorge Luís Borges in college, and later on with an exhaustive two-semester course spent reading El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Quijote, along with "Las ruinas circulares," "La biblioteca de Bábel," and "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote," all by Borges, attack the reader's sense of time and place, and render a literary picture whose plot structure would resember an Escher painting. Very recently, film has explored the same roads, asking viewers to bend their understanding of the plot around a time structure that is completely unhinged from the conventional unidirectional axis. I am thinking specifically of Memento and Inception (both Christopher Nolan films), and of the more independent, but equally brilliant, Primer (which in its scant runtime of less than an hour defenestrates every popular media depiction of the consequences of potential time travel), but these are ancient themes. I recommend that anyone who is interested in thinking about the philosophy of time read Being and time (Heidegger), and A brief history of time (Hawking), both of which read very smoothly despite their appearance as esoteric slogs.
Since becoming involved with Columbia College, I have started to pay more attention to the possibilities related to connecting math and the more visual arts, and I plan to compile here links to some of the websites I have found interesting on this path. Please feel free to email me if you have something you think belongs here.
Art informed by mathematics
- Mathematical imagery at the American Mathematical Society
- "Celebrating mathematics in stone and bronze," Helaman and Claire Ferguson, AMS Notices, vol. 57 (2010), no. 07
