# Talk:Mathematics and art

I think the dance section should be moved to an article named "Mathematics and Dance". This article focuses more on mathematics and visual arts.   — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mantis Orquida (talk • contribs) 19:53, 15 December 2022 (UTC) 

Moved from User talk:Coldcreation
Hi [Coldcreation], and thank you for your unexpected and major contribution to this article. I have been working intensively on the article,^ having already brought Tessellation to GA, and am planning to nominate Mathematics and art shortly. I am actually waiting for the publication of Tyson's Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History next month, in case it offers any radically new insights.  
This brings me to the delicate matter of the length of your contribution. The article contains 150 words on Theo van Doesberg and De Stijl; 200 words on Man Ray and the Dadaists; 170 words on M. C. Escher and his tessellations and polyhedra (a topic which IP editors would cheerfully extend to ten times the length, but I digress); and similar amounts on numerous other topics of similar importance. The article as a whole was already some 6,000 words long (65,000 bytes) before your contribution, which I'm told would take about 40 minutes to read end to end: quite long enough, probably. Extending every section to the level of detail you have given to "Poincaré and Cubism", over 900 words, would make the article unacceptably long, perhaps four or five times its current length. 
Further, the subsections in the "A complex relationship" each focus on a relationship between mathematics and art, avoiding as far as possible the history of the artworks, artists and movements involved, just as they avoid most of the mathematics on the other end of the relationship. The new section does not in my view really fit into this scheme, whereas it would fit perfectly as a paragraph in a section on art inspired by mathematics. 
I'd therefore suggest that we make a subsidiary article on Poincaré and Cubism, linking to it with a further link, and summarising it in a paragraph of about 200 words here in Mathematics and art. That will do justice to your careful work on the topic, and maintain the balance of the article. It will also enable linking from the articles on both Poincaré and Cubism: the former doesn't even mention Cubism at the moment. I do hope this will be acceptable to you.  Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:52, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

^ By the way, thanks for thanking me for the reference formatting. I actually did this without noticing that the ref I was micro-editing while making finishing touches before nominating was a new section! ... which may explain any apparent discontinuity between that and this talk page. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:00, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your message Chiswick Chap. I will try to summarize (down to about 200 words) the section on Poincaré and Cubism. It will take me a while but should be done some time today. In the mean time, feel free to move the section where you feel it would fit best. I don't think we need an new article on Poincaré and Cubism since much of the material is already present in articles Proto-Cubism and Section d'Or. Coldcreation (talk) 09:02, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Excellent. I'll make a quick summary now, and finish formatting the references; feel free to tweak my summary later today. If I'm feeling strong I will create links to and from the other articles we have both mentioned. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:10, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Chiswick Chap, I've just made one tentative summary and will do so again shortly. Coldcreation (talk) 09:24, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
OK, I'm still waiting for it. But I think trying to squeeze down the existing text is going to be harder than just writing a few sentences of summary from scratch; and it won't need its own section heading.
@ Coldcreation: I've drafted a text of suitable length. I suggest we use that for now, without prejudice to adjustments of the wording. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:54, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Not bad Chiswick Chap but there are a few inaccuracies (or over-simplifications) that need to be adjusted. I will use you model to draft another version. Note: the topic of mathematics was so important to the Cubists (and thus to modern art in general) that I think a new section is justified. Coldcreation (talk) 07:07, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll set things up in the article then for you to reword a little. I really don't agree with having yet another section just for the Cubists; they are comparable to the Dadaists, Escher and De Stijl in importance to the subject of this article (that is no comment on their significance elsewhere), and should have similar coverage, as we agreed yesterday. On simplification, we can only state the bare fact that there was a relationship here; a blow-by-blow account of art history would be out of place (irrelevant and WP:UNDUE) in this article. Remember that these examples (of use of math in art) form just one of seven other relationships discussed in section 2, so the article is not mainly about art movements. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:40, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
Good points, but let's no forget that Dadaists and De Stijl evolved from Cubism. Coldcreation (talk) 08:24, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Re the sentence "The Golden Ratio, roughly equal to 1.618, has persistently been claimed[29][30][31][32][33] in modern times to have been known to the ancients in Egypt, Greece and elsewhere, without reliable evidence": there is very clear evidence that as a mathematical ratio it was known to the Greeks:it appears in Euclid. The thing that there isn't reliable evidence for is the application of this ratio to the proportions of art and architecture. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:32, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks: reworded the sentence. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:57, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/dec/02/why-the-history-of-maths-is-also-the-history-of-art
—David Eppstein (talk) 00:46, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks David! I'm enjoying Lynn Gamwell's book, but am disappointed that she doesn't cover Islamic geometric patterns or indeed Moghul architecture which one might have thought highly relevant to the subject. The inclusion (in book and ref) of an Islamic-inspired American work is remarkable more for what it doesn't say than what it does. And sure enough, The Grauniad has misspelt her name! Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:05, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 11:41, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Editors of this article are invited to take part the discussions of two non-free images used in the article which have been relisted at Files for discussion:

Wikipedia:Files_for_discussion/2025_July_5#File:Max_Ernst_making_Lissajous_Figures_1942.jpg
Wikipedia:Files_for_discussion/2025_July_5#File:René_Magritte_The_Human_Condition.jpg
I am not sure why no notice was posted here earlier. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:21, 9 July 2025 (UTC)

 This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 September 2025 and 10 November 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Fionagriffin07 (article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by Fionagriffin07 (talk) 14:30, 22 September 2025 (UTC)