![]() Maggie Aderin-Pocock, the space scientist, declared it the most beautiful equation and she is in good company. With E=mc 2, Albert Einstein built a bridge between energy and mass, two concepts that had previously seemed worlds apart. The beauty of other formulae may be more obvious. Euler’s formula marries the world of circles, imaginary numbers and exponentials. But the beauty comes from a deeper understanding: here the five most important mathematical constants are brought together. It is neat and compact even to the naive eye. Written in the 18th century by the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, the relation is short and simple: e iπ+1 = 0. There is common neurophysiological ground,” says Sir Michael Atiyah, an honorary professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University.Īsk mathematicians about the most beautiful equation and one crops up time and again. “So far as the brain is concerned, maths has beauty just like art. The more beautiful the formula, the greater the activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex. It’s not how it looks, it‘s about the underlying thought processes.”īrain scans of mathematicians show that gazing at formulae considered beautiful by the beholder elicits activity in the same emotional region as great art and music. “It’s the same with a piece of mathematics. It’s about the music and the ideas and the emotional response,” says Vicky Neale, a mathematician at Oxford University. “The slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto is a really beautiful piece of music, but I don’t print off a page of the score and put that on my wall. For those who learn the language, maths has the same capacity for beauty as art, music, a full blanket of stars on the darkest night. Maths becomes beautiful through the power and elegance of its arguments and formulae through the bridges it builds between previously unconnected worlds. What does it mean for maths to be beautiful? It is not about the appearance of the symbols on the page. Dirac was talking quantum theory and gravity. But the word beauty never defined a sunset, nor a flower, or nature in any traditional sense. ![]() ![]() ![]() In the article he painted a picture of how physicists saw nature. It makes four appearances in four consecutive sentences. In one essay, from May 1963, the British Nobel laureate referred to beauty nine times. ![]()
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