Instructor:
Have you ever wondered why poetry rhymes? Or why we dance to music? Or why the muted palette of an old master painting looks so beautiful? A sequence of words are lined up and tied together by their congruent sounds; the movements of the body are amplified by the undulating beats; the different shades of aging burnt umber form a harmonious landscape — everything, seemingly unrelated at first, comes together, and generates a moment of being in sync, a moment of beauty. Now, what if we try to bring two very drastically different fields together, that is, math and art, and observe how they can become in sync, how is that possible? How do we do that? How will we feel if we succeed? We will try to address these questions in this course by drawing inspirations from literature, visual arts and mathematics, as well as creating our own examples where math and art come together, exploring and analyzing the implications of aesthetics provided by these examples, how they affect our understanding of beauty and truth. Everyone will be deemed a curious artist from day 1.