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I've spent the last hour pouring over the latest magnificently illustrated column by the marvelous Maria Kalman. It's a beautiful tribute to a brilliant, insatiably curious Renaissance man. Check it out. Kalman notes that the subject spoke six languages and was also "a scientist, philosopher, statesman, architect, musician, naturalist, zoologist, botanist, farmer, bibliophile, inventor, art and wine connoisseur, mathematician... [as well as] Govenor, Secretary of State, Minister to the Court of Louis XVI, Vice President, President..."

The mind reels.

I can't help but wonder what it must be like to have all portions of the brain functioning at maximum capacity, and how it must feel to see it all come together-- art and reason, math and "beauty." For my entire life, the math part of my brain has been functionally catatonic... what do mathematicians mean when they say "math is beautiful?"

I'm learning about Greek architecture in one of my classes, and my course textbook states that the Parthenon "may be expressed algebraically as x = 2y + 1." The book goes on to state that the "stylobates ratio of length to width is 9:4, because 9 = (2 x 4) + 1." (Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Global History, 13th Edition, Volume 1, pp 127).

But it's not just buildings (which are in essence configurations of geometry) that can be explained in this way. The book also covers Pythagoras' assertion that "harmonic chords in music are produced on the lyre at regular intervals that may be expressed as ratios of whole numbers--2:1, 3:2, 4:3. He and his followers, the Pythagoreans, believed more generally that underlying proportions could be found in all of nature, determining the form of the cosmos as well as of things on earth that beauty resided in harmonious numerical ratios. By this resoning, a perfect statue would be one constructed according to an all-encompassing mathematical formula."(pp 124)

A statue? Really??

Huh.

This September I'll begin studying algebra... so maybe my teacher can explain this concept to me, because I just can't grasp it. It's like the math part of my brain is a dead limb. I can yell at it and poke it with a stick... I could even hurl a discus at it... but it just lies there, lifeless and inert. Wake up, right brain!! If algebra doesn't rouse you, maybe my forthcoming astronomy class will. Consider yourself warned, you lazy motha.