"The one thing that marks the true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain truth which give up the feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone." (Oliver W Holmes, "The Professor at the Breakfast Table Ticknor and Fields", 1860)
"A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature. [...] we work not only to obtain the positive results which, according to the profane, constitute our one and only affection, as to experience this esthetic emotion and to convey it to others who are capable of experiencing it." (Henri Poincaré, "Notice sur Halphen", Journal de l'École Polytechnique, 1890)
"The true mathematician is always a great deal of an artist, an architect, yes, of a poet. Beyond the real world, though perceptibly connected with it, mathematicians have created an ideal world which they attempt to develop into the most perfect of all worlds, and which is being explored in every direction. None has the faintest conception of this world except him who knows it; only presumptuous ignorance can assert that the mathematician moves in a narrow circle. The truth which he seeks is, to be sure, broadly considered, neither more nor less than consistency; but does not his mastership show, indeed, in this very limitation? To solve questions of this kind he passes unenviously over others." (Alfred Pringsheim, Jaresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung Vol 13, 1904)
"Imagine any sort of model and a copy of it done by an awkward artist: the proportions are altered, lines drawn by a trembling hand are subject to excessive deviation and go off in unexpected directions. From the point of view of metric or even projective geometry these figures are not equivalent, but they appear as such from the point of view of geometry of position [that is, topology]." (Henri Poincaré, "Dernières pensées", 1920)
"There is a science of simple things, an art of complicated ones. Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science." (Paul Valéry, "Moralités", 1932)
"Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth." (Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1945)
"Nature does not seem full of circles and triangles to the ungeometrical; rather, mastery of the theory of triangles and circles, and later of conic sections, has taught the theorist, the experimenter, the carpenter, and even the artist to find them everywhere, from the heavenly motions to the pose of a Venus."
"For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relation- ships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality." (Gene Youngblood, "Expanded Cinema", 1970)
"Though we can say that mathematics is not art, some mathematicians think of themselves as artists of pure form. It seems clear, however, that their elegant and near aesthetic forms fail as art, because they are secondary visual ideas, the product of an intellectual set of restraints, rather than the cause of a felt insight realized in and through visual form." (Robert E Mueller, "Idols of Computer Art", 1972)
"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." (Isaac Asimov, "The Roving Mind", 1983)
"Literature is as much a product of the technological and scientific milieu as it is of the artistic one. Some of the large ideas, call them theories or metaphors - that humans are machines, that the observer affects the phenomenon observed, that information can be quantified - alter the way work is done in art. Metaphors invented by artists imply new ways of seeing, demolish mere logic, provoke alternatives, and lead to new theories in science." (David Porush, "The Soft Machine", 1985)
"Fractal geometry appears to have created a new category of art, next to art for art’s sake and art for the sake of commerce: art for the sake of science (and of mathematics). [...] The source of fractal art resides in the recognition that very simple mathematical formulas that seem completely barren may in fact be pregnant, so to speak, with an enormous amount of graphic structure. The artist’s taste can only affect the selection of formulas to be rendered, the cropping and the rendering. Thus, fractal art seems to fall outside the usual categories of ‘invention’, ‘discovery’ and ‘creativity’." (Benoît B Mandelbrot, "Fractals and an Art for the Sake of Science", 1989)
"[...] in science there are collectors, classifiers, compulsory tidiers-up and permanent contesters, detectives, some artists and many artisans, there are poet-scientists and philosophers and even a few mystics." (Rolf M Zinkernagel, [Nobel lecture] 1996)
"'Doing mathematics' is thus working on the construction of some mathematical object and resembles other creative enterprises of the mind in a scientific or artistic domain. But while the mental exercise of creating mathematics is somehow related to that of creating art, it should remain clear that mathematical objects are very different from the artistic objects that occur in literature, music, or the visual arts." (David Ruelle, "The Mathematician's Brain", 2007)
"It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness." (Jonah Lehrer, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist", 2011)
No comments:
Post a Comment