Blueprints
Marcus du Sautoy (UK, out now); (US, 16 September))
Marcus Du Sautoy wants us to see mathematics and art as inextricably connected. “Both are creating ways to interpret, understand, and navigate our place in the universe,” he begins his new book, Blueprints: How mathematics shapes creativity.
I’m not sure who still doubts this, nearly a century after Albert Einstein and his violin; this book feels a little redundant in a time of ample high-profile collaborations between du Sautoy’s “two cultures” of emotions and logic that the author bemoans as ever at odds. But if you still need it, du Sautoy, , is here to convince you that artists are “secret mathematicians”, while mathematicians prove theorems with creativity.
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The evidence? The stories of dozens of musicians, painters, architects, some poets, a dancer and a lone crocheter, detailing how their work aligns with what he calls “blueprints” – structures of the universe that mathematicians try to explain. Du Sautoy finds connections to enduring mysteries like prime numbers, symmetry and randomness across a wide array of artistic crafts.
For example, the architect Le Corbusier’s use of Fibonacci sequences in his buildings worked well because these numbers encode optimal patterns of biological growth. Jackson Pollock’s signature paint splatters reflect the fractal, a geometry of nature seen in mountains and coastlines; you can tell if a painting is his by measuring its degree of fractal-ness. Imitations of his work lack this complexity.
Does du Sautoy support his point about arts as unconsciously maths-based, or “reveal that mathematics is at the heart of many artistic practices”, as he writes? Not so much. Instead, most of his examples feature single artists who had a conscious fascination with mathematics, or practices where the mathematical tie-in feels incidental, not central.
Still, Blueprints sings as a book about maths that is also grounded in art. Du Sautoy is skilled at bringing numerical concepts to life, whether explaining the Golden Ratio with help from a creatively structured novel (Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries), or demonstrating the power of prime numbers through composer Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. I left it better understanding, and enjoying, the problems pondered by mathematicians, helped by the creations of artists like J.S. Bach and Jorge Luis Borges. I can picture a hypercurve while looking at a sculpture, and rotational symmetry in 1000-year-old tiles at Spain’s Alhambra.
But while du Sautoy writes elegantly about mathematics, his evocation of music, sculpture and dance is flat in comparison, with few descriptions of colours, shapes, moods or the experience of an artist’s work. I wanted more feeling from his stories of artists’ ties to history – like how the Dadaist Jean Arp channeled randomness in his collage pieces as a response to the horrors of the first world war. How did that choice serve his inner life, coping with that horror? This silence has the effect of leaving the arts subservient to mathematics, rather than a space where people explore a staggering variety of questions about being human while sometimes also leaning on maths.
With those gaps in mind, I’m dubious this book will bring a maths-lover closer to appreciating art if they don’t already. But the many stories within Blueprints help us understand why so many mathematicians have dedicated their lives to considering questions, even whole dimensions, that don’t quite seem to touch our own worlds. And why many artists follow.
Christie Taylor is a science journalist based in New York
