Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Math as art

Here is a math video so good that it's fun to watch even if you aren't interested in the math.

In art, there is the problem of perspective, the realistic representation of three-dimensional objects in two dimensions. In Medieval art, the Bayeaux Tapestry for example, objects are flat and depth is indicated by overlapping. During the Renaissance, artists worked out the rules of perspective by trial and error. In the seventeenth century, the mathematicians formalized the process, beat it to death, and called it projective geometry. And now we have come full circle: a video illustrating one of the basic principles of projective geometry, a video that is itself a work of art.

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