Nature is beautiful, so with so many different, unique shapes and patterns. Such irregular dimensions and variations theses appear too random to have any mathematical connection.
Professor Ian Stewart our mathematical says this isn't the case.
That the appearance of beauty in nature is strongly influenced by numbers and our perceptions of beauty are connected to mathematics too.
The spirals on a sunflower the seeds are arranged in spiral patterns. Count the number of seeds in each spiral and you produce numbers such as 55 in one direction and 89 in the other direction, or 34 in one direction and 55 in the other. These pairs of number are known as Fibonacci numbers. Professor Ian Stewart explains that these numbers correspond very closely with growth and design in plants.
"Those numbers are clues to the dynamic process, which is the way the plant grows" .
All of the different plants grow in a similar pattern. New parts of the plant are arranged at the tip of a shoot in a spiral pattern. If you do the maths on the spiral pattern Fibonacci numbers fall out.
Professor Ian Stewart suggests that with all the different patterns that can be found in the animal kingdom there is a kind of hidden unity.
"It's as if there is a kind of universal pattern book with a particular kind of mathematical system that generates all the patterns in the book"
Theory suggests that the stripes in animals such as Zebras or Tigers are created by waves of chemicals diffusing through the tissues of the animals at a very early stage in their development. The patterns for the adult are pretty much laid down in the embryo.
"If you study the mathematics of these waves you get the same kind of patterns of waves. If you look at waves on the ocean they arrange themselves in parallel rows just like the stripes on a tiger and mathematically there is a unity in all of these things."
Ian Stewart suggests that evolution may have played a role in our perception of beauty. People are sensitive to changes in a pattern, we are intrigued by patterns that don't quite work.(I wonder is that why the models of today are so alien looking with there lollypop heads, abnormal height and long thin limbs? just as the victorians found deformity of the natural waist pleasing, is this the same?)
As we've grown up in a world where perspective is given, it seems very odd that someone had to conceive how to portray it.
Tom Korner tells us that before the Renaissance there was no perspective in paintings. People knew that things looked different. In older paintings things in the distance looked smaller but there was no consistency.
"Leonardo Da Vinci thought you could not be an artist without being a mathematician" as does Vivieene Westwood: fashion design according to Vivieene Westwood is "almost like mathmatics" "you have a vocabulary of ideas which you have to add and subtract in order to come up with an equation for the right time" - An unfashionable life, J,Mulragh.p.11
Are there common elements in paintings that people are attracted to?
According to Ian Stewart worldwide with the exception of the Dutch everybody likes a landscape with some water and some mountains in the background, a few trees and a few animals. The belief is that this goes back to when we lived on the Savannahs and this sort of landscape was a safe place to be.
So is everythin we see as beautiful build on human instincts and that everything has a pattern. I'm still slightly confused as to why throughout history it also seems our natural instinct for body deforment and how this can be percieved as attractive, and it only seems so with women... is it then mens idea of perfection that we're trying to achieve??
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