Feb

18

Terence Tao, who has been called the “Mozart of Mathematics,” wrote an essay in 2007 about the common ingredients in “good” mathematical research. In this episode, the Fields Medalist joins Steven Strogatz to revisit the topic.

Dr Tao's website.

Gyve Bones offers:

Einstein, Address to German League of Human Rights:

Although I am a typical loner in daily life, consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a mancan have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

Richard Feynman, from The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

Pope Benedict XVI, On Beauty as a Way to God:

I remember a concert performance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach—in Munich in Bavaria—conducted by Leonard Bernstein. At the conclusion of the final selection, one of the Cantate, I felt—not through reasoning, but in the depths of my heart—that what I had just heard had spoken truth to me, truth about the supreme composer, and it moved me to give thanks to God. Seated next to me was the Lutheran bishop of Munich. I spontaneously said to him: “Whoever has listened to this understands that faith is true”—and the beauty that irresistibly expresses the presence of God’s truth.


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