Math & Art

As a person from a family that celebrated art, it's no coincidence I found myself drawn to math, physics, and engineering later in life. Mathematics and logic, although they are entwined in art, also serve as a kind of remedy to the overly emotional, imaginative, and naïve places that art sometimes arises from.

While I think art is good and still appreciate it—also having made a lot of art in my youth—now that I am older, have become more educated, and have a greater sense of agency, today not only do I have an appreciation for it, but I also have reservations about it.

Do not misunderstand me. I'm not saying art is bad, or that we should turn our backs on art. As a math-brained person, I am nonetheless willing to meet artists in the middle and be the first to admit the beauty and importance of art.

But in my experience, I've also noticed that some of those who do art—and only art—seem less willing to lean across the aisle to appreciate math, logic, ethics, etc. It's quite a conundrum.

It's analogous to the way some of the most mindful people I know who regulary use math and engineering to solve problems tend to maintain a nuanced tolerance of those who hold pseudoscientific beliefs. But in stark contrast, those who hold pseudoscientific beliefs oftem seem not to tolerate math and logic at all.

Another pattern I've noticed is that the art we tend to appreciate is often that which merely affirms what we impulsively feel, or what we want to believe—what is easy, convenient, or validating—regardless if it is actually true, good, and useful to believe. In this way, I believe art can be quite naïve.

It can even have the effect of leading us astray, preventing us from thinking, growing, and living rationally, rather than liberating us. In this way, I hypothesize that art is a sort of "cognitohazard" at times, because it tends to compel us under the sway of emotion—be it pleasure, anger, conceit, etc—rather than compelling us by reason. I still believe art can be good. But I also suspect it's capable of stunting and blinding us.

Math, logic, and ethics tend to be the other way around—they make us slow down to consider what is difficult to believe, allowing us the opportunity to relinquish ignorance, to break free from naïveté—and provide us a staircase of rational and intellectual reasoning to climb.