Subject: Re: [HM] Marcel Duchamp and Mathematics
From: Gordon (gfisher@shentel.net)
Date: Sun Jan 09 2000 - 17:38:19 EST
Bill Everdell wrote:
>
> I was sorry to miss Shearer's conference in November. She raises the same
> issues Henderson does about the relationship between mathematics and visual
> art -- which is always closer than the one between mathematics and poetry.
>
Hmmm... There is, I suggest, broadly speaking, and according to some of us, a
kind of bounded linear continuum, a closed line segment, of classifications of
mathematicians with pure (let's call them that) algebraists (and mathematical
logicians) at one end and pure geometers (and topologists) at the other. Would
you say that those of us who tend to fall toward the algebraic end would be more
apt to feel akin to poets and prose stylists, and those of us who tend to fall
toward the geometric end would be more apt to feel akin to visual artists of one
kind or another?
I like to think of Euclid as a person in the middle, so to speak, who wrote a
prose masterpiece (it was, after all, written in a language) in which he
translated or transformed some geometry into prose. Similarly later with
Descartes and other founders of algebraic and analytic geometry, after
developments such as the algebra of Viete.
In such work, and to some degree in all mathematical work, there is, don't you
think, an interaction between what one might call the literal and the visual?
When beauty or utility are involved, especially in connection with communication,
there are, are there not, analogies, and aesthetic and perhaps even
syn(a)esthetic crossovers?
Gordon Fisher gfisher@shentel.net
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