Thursday, March 06, 2025
The hidden mathematics behind why you find things beautiful
Big Think: “Some people will hate what I say,” the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy tells me, “because it’s all about unweaving the rainbow. Some people want to retain the magic and don’t want to know why something’s working. That’s fine. But actually, for me, you know, the rainbow becomes much more interesting when you understand what is happening to the light that makes the rainbow like that.”
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This interview is actually so cool to me, as an artist who supposedly “hates math”. I believe that we discovered mathematics through patterns, which many artforms like music for example crucially rely on. I think that math, art, and science are all different forms and combinations of each other. I think formalism is a great example and way to separate art from design. From the creators perspective, formalism is a little bit essential when it comes to making conscious decisions in a piece. Some will say that artists make decisions in their art because it emotionally feels right, whereas designers will make decisions in their art based on their consumers' predicted reactions. But its all subjective; even formalism itself is in my opinion purely rooted in an individual's reactions to a piece based on their individual experience. Something scares me or more so, some PEOPLE that scare the living crap out of me are those who mindlessly consume art. People who find things beautiful but don't like to understand why, does understanding something not make it more beautiful? Like yes, it is really fun to go full monkey brain and notice that everything is magic like wow! That's a cat and it's there because of magic and the sky is blue because it can be but that's all just watered down thinking. I think that ‘good’ art or actually really impactful art is when you become removed from thinking about why something is so great. Being in awe of another's work is so inspiring because then you have to backtrack and be like: wait hold up. What makes this so good? What aspects here are creating magic? And that's what I think the goal of the performance arts are, whether live or prerecorded and edited it's all about making magic believable and forcing you to go monkey brained.
I really like this idea of beauty as a thing that can be scientifically discovered or manufactured to an extent based on mathematics. With things like the fibonacci sequence, or the golden ratio, numbers and fractions are at the core of what makes them work the way they do. I also think that his statements can be taken a step further and applied to natural beauty and the environment. For example, flowers have mathematical properties in their symmetry that contributes to how people view them. In humans and animals, we often value a symmetrical face or body, and perceive people with the ‘perfect proportioned face’ to be especially beautiful. This article is very applicable to theatrical design, in multiple different aspects including scenery, costumes, and lighting. When designing a show, balance and mathematical symmetry can be used to evoke specific emotions in the audience. For example, if everything on the set is just slightly unbalanced, the audience may feel that something is off or unsettling.
I thought that this article was really interesting because it brought up ideas that I've heard of but sort of never put together to create this idea that math is why we find things beautiful. and I know that's crazy to say I enjoy math I wouldn't say I love it but to think of the idea of rainbows refracting light and the golden ratio and like the Fibonacci spiral used in fashion and other Industries like that, it's really interesting to see that patterns and repetition and Mathematics are what is creating these aesthetically pleasing things to look at or to hear. I just think this is a really interesting point to bring up in a really valid point no matter how much you hate math it is still the I guess logical reason why we find things beautiful. I sort of want to Circle back to the rainbow cuz they brought up dissecting the rainbow in this article and I just thought that was really interesting and how sort The bending of light is what creates a scientific rainbow and Mathematical I guess and just really cool and beautiful so I guess math can be beautiful.
This article was a little bit of a stretch to me. I do not know why but I was expecting it to be a little more philosophical which I guess does not make sense as this article quite literally had math in the title. I had heard about the golden ratio before as we talked about it in our basic design class and this article brought up similar thoughts for me. I adore math. It works in one way and there is only one right answer. I think the idea of this article is misleading for those of us that are math lovers. It seems like this might create a “right answer” but it does not. It gives guide lines or thoughts but then everyone is like “wouldn’t it tell a story if we went against the rules” and then all of the sudden I am confused again. There is nothing mathematical about art.
As a BXA, this type of interconnection between STEM and art is exactly the type of thing I’m passionate about. I’ve never heard the term “formalism”, but I think it perfectly describes the way I think about art. Especially because I’m a very logical thinker. Just like Du Sautoy, I think knowing the “why” and “how” makes something so much more interesting, and is part of why a lot of art is thought-provoking for me. I think art and STEM overlap a tremendous amount in so many ways, and that’s why I really enjoy doing a BXA. There’s so many things in the theater world, especially technical theater, that is engineering, math, physics, etc. This even exists in the design world. Composition is about math, costume design requires knowledge of material science, lighting and sound use physics.
Going in, I had a couple of guesses about what phenomena the article would talk about. But some of these I had never considered before. The most intriguing one was the fact about how Shakespeare used numbers. .
This article reminds me a lot of a playground piece I saw this year- an adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. In it, the role math plays in our understanding of the world is called into question and philosophized upon. I personally view math as a language we use to describe the world around us. There is no inherent quality to our existence that *proves* math, our concept of numbers is entirely made up. But we can use these constructs to describe and explain the patterns in the world around us. Because math is so abstract and can be applied to so many things, I think it absolutely has a place in the art world. It can be used to quantify and explain audience reactions and desires, and I think thats really fascinating, and as an art-maker, also really useful. I really like the term formalism. I hadn't heard of it before, but it describes a perspective regarding art that I really enjoy exploring. Learning about the science behind art and why certain things work is something that has always deeply interested me, and now I have a word to put to it! I'll have to check out some books regarding the subject.
I think that everything in the world has a meaning and everything in the world also has a connection to everything else in the world. I love seeing how schools of thought overlap and interact with each other, so this article was a very interesting read for me. The part I found most interesting was the little section on Shakespeare and his poetry— how the most famous and hard hitting lines are the 11 syllable lines he wrote in contrast to his traditional iambic pentameter. The way that math and numbers can play into this psychological effect of the human mind is so interesting to me, we see it all the time in music and the like. I love that it points out the use of mathematical structures in the daily and natural worlds, du Sautoy including things like chickens and plants in his arguments. I agree with the last sentence of this article which asks if mathematics is compromising art or any of these natural beauty things. Thompson writes, “Does that diminish the beauty? Does that dispel the magic? I think I’m with du Sautoy on this. It only makes it stronger.”
This is such a beautiful idea, I’ve always been curious about why exactly do we as a collective society find certain things more visually appealing than others. I think a lot of that is often derived from any person’s desire to conform and fit in when it comes to trends, oftentimes something becomes popular because people think other people really like that thing, and it exponentially continues after that. However, as much as we could chalk up a collective support of the visual appearance of things to our naturally social habits as a species, I really like what this article is suggesting. That there are perhaps specific details found in all sorts of things that we all collectively gravitate towards. I had heard of the fibonacci spiral being brought up in this manner before, with evidence of it being found commonly in things we as humans typically find beautiful in nature. I had not heard of Pollock's Fractals or the iambic pentameter so those were interesting to read about.
The BXA in me was immediately attracted to this title. I was very curious to see if they would provide numbers or formulas for the way we perceive things. But at the same time, these subjects are generally rather separated for me. I have a found a lot of overlap between engineering/math and design, but it’s not an easy claim to make, just saying “here’s the math of why you see things as beautiful”. This article provided some ideas and concepts, but it didn’t give as much detail in the way I was hoping and expecting. It drew parallels and explained that geometry exists in nature and I suppose that sort’ve explains why we perceive it as beautiful, but really I was hoping for more specific evidence in this article. I felt more as if this article was giving tips for how we could make our art more attractive than explaining our perception.
I think that formalism is a very interesting concept to read about. This is not the first time that I have been introduced to this subject as we have talked about before in class and previously throughout my life. Formalism makes sense to me but I think there is something about beauty and nature that can’t be contained into words and numbers. I definitely agree that there are structures to the natural world. The golden ratio, hexagons in beehives, patterns in flowers, and fractals in snowflakes are all examples of where symmetry and mathematics come into play. Despite all this, I think a part of creativity and nature is that it is inherently random and created. The way a sunset looks, how a flower chooses to grow and bloom, and how an artist creates a painting all have natural creativity and beauty in them. In general, I think beauty is about 70% formalism as there are structures, patters, and techniques that make things beautiful, but the remaining 30% is pure creativity, nature, and innovation that makes something truly beautiful.
I’m always wary about the idea of things being mathematically beautiful, because I do agree that there are many cases, both in places like architecture and nature, where something is mathematically beautiful, but I think there are also some things that I feel like are less mathematically perfect but are no less beautiful. I think messy, non-ratio pictures, or a field of flowers, something etc. can all be just as beautiful as the perfect Fibbonaci spiral of a shell. I do think that the mathematical beauty and it’s off putting nature when used incorrectly is an interesting concept to explore in stage design, because it may be like a ditch tilt in how it leaves the audience with a feeling of unease for reasons they can’t fully articulate, but I’d be cautious to say that there are concrete and known mathematics behind everything beautiful in the world. Personally I also think it takes a lot of the joy out of creation with how it is discussed sometimes.
Being a Technical Director in theatre aligns perfectly with what this article articulates. We use math to create art, understanding the relationship between the language of the world and how humans perceive it. This allows us to construct new worlds and bring stories to life on stage. The best Technical Directors not only master these tools but also innovate, transforming the design team’s ideas into reality. I believe Technical Directors embody the Formalism philosophy—seeing the connection between numbers and art and using that understanding to build new ways of storytelling. Engineers share an aspect of this reality, but their focus is often on whether something meets a specific condition within a number-based system. In contrast, a Technical Director must meet those conditions while ensuring the design achieves a precise artistic vision—one that looks and functions exactly as intended, night after night, for the sake of the story. We operate within constraints, but we also need to understand why those constraints exist. Only by grasping the deeper purpose behind a design can we successfully navigate the technical challenges and bring art to life.
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