[ajc-sorin]

On a slight tangent, I find it interesting the contrast the author paints between poetry and math. Perhaps it was unintentional, but it saddens me to hear or read people discuss math as if it were some polar opposite of the arts (or in this article, poetry).

Math, physics, biology, the 'hard' sciences, all have so much more in common with the arts than we give credit. Is a math proof not poetic in its own right? Does a well structured musical composition not engage with our most innate neurology on a microscopic level?

What's sad to me is that we seem to silo people into one of the two camps, which is like locking someone in a room in search of a key that's in the room next door. Businesses do this too - how many engineers get brought on to learn marketing? How many chefs learn the chemistry which serves as a foundation for every recipe they cook?

I say this as a former political-science-major-turned-accountant. I loved tax policy, but struggled to understand the law and treatment of certain issues, so I switched to accounting and found that the same logical, rational work that goes into formulating a political argument can be applied to rationalize control processes or budgeting in businesses. I've tried to un-learn my bias against people who majored in the "soft" sciences and strive to make more of an effort to understand how they think and what drives them.

[travmatt]

"""

When mathematicians describe equations as beautiful, they are not lying. Brain scans show that their minds respond to beautiful equations in the same way other people respond to great paintings or masterful music. The finding could bring neuroscientists closer to understanding the neural basis of beauty, a concept that is surprisingly hard to define.

In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

"""

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/equations-are-art...

[eli_gottlieb]

>The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

From the sound of that, "beauty" evokes a reward response in the part of the brain (medial orbitofrontal cortex) responsible for processing reinforcement learning signals. This is pretty interesting, since it says that the brain can process a reward signal for a very abstract property that probably has very little correlation with direct sensory rewards.

[vlasev]

Quite a few of our conversations with my ex (who is an artist) revolved around the contrast between mathematics and the arts. We realized quite early on that mathematics is actually quite artistic and could have easily been considered one of the arts, if it weren't for its inescapable rules and structure. High level mathematics takes just as much creativity as any of the arts.

[kian]

I don't think this necessarily negates it being one of the arts. They very act of choosing which rules to induce a particular structure is the art itself, no? (since the space of possible rules is infinite)

[kian]

Completely agree about the sadness in the contrast they paint between the sciences and the arts. send an email to this username at cerebralinguist.net - I have something for you that's not quite ready for public consumption yet.