Daniar Hussain
June 1, 1999
Art
and Arithmetic
Entering the food court of the Museum
of Contemporary Art, with windows looking out onto downtown Chicago, my mind
was at once captivated by 10,000 handcrafted kites of wood and string that
lined the ceiling and gave an illusion of infinite space. Jacob Hashimoto, a Japanese-American artist,
designed and crafted “An Infinite Expanse of Sky” to convey to his spectators
the awesome grandeur of our infinite Universe.
As an artist, his goal was to bring understanding and appreciation to
the intricate and incomprehensible. The
mathematician has a similar urge to fathom the unfathomable. Both artist and mathematician seek an order
and harmony in their works, always hunting for a deeper meaning in our Cosmos.
The infinite has always captivated the
mathematician and the artist alike – it has always challenged the greatest
minds to reach the greatest heights of understanding. The illusive nature of infinity – always endless and always out
of reach – requires utmost devotion and concentration. It demands simultaneously mental rigor and
flexibility of imagination. The artist
and the mathematician are most dedicated, sometimes to the point of insanity,
to their life-long goals of understanding.
In Giordano Bruno, the artistic and mathematical senses conspired in the
same individual to create a genius that would question our most basic
assumptions about the Universe. Bruno
wrote poetry, studied philosophy, and worked on original mathematics – his
quest for understanding did not stop at the boundary of any one subject. He wrote of the beauty of Nature and
marveled at the vastness of the night sky.
Convicted by the Inquisition for believing in an Infinite Universe, he
was burned at the stake in the year 1600.
The unity and interdependence of art and mathematics
is seen in the ancient roots of the words.
Arithmetic, the earliest of the mathematical disciplines, comes from the
Greek word arithmos, or ‘number,’
which stems from the Indo-European root ar-,
which means “to fit together.”
Arithmetic – the study of addition and multiplication – is the “fitting
together” of numbers. Art, which also
stems from the same ancient root, is an “expression of what is most beautiful”
(Webster’s Dictionary) – a fitting together of the apparent chaos of the world
into a magnificent edifice. The same
stem can be seen in such words as order and harmony which, not surprisingly,
are commonly used to describe both works of art and mathematical proofs.
Hashimoto has brought the infinite within reach of
our minds – he had subdued the tiger and relieved the apprehension. He had turned the unimaginable into the
reachable so that others can share in his appreciation. This is fundamentally what all artistic and
mathematical creations are all about – revealing the reality that may be
directly impenetrable to the senses.
Art and mathematics reveal the inner substructure of the world around us
that would otherwise remain invisible.
As William Faulkner said, “Art reveals new truth and beauty in what is
already in front of our own eyes.”
Hashimoto’s kites remind us of the grandeur of the infinite sky we see
every night. They bring the feeling of
magnificence closer to us.
Looking up at that ceiling lined with kites, color
and number blended into a shifting silhouette of insight. Immediately I came to appreciate the
harmonic blending of the artistic and the mathematical in the manifestation of
infinity – the forever inaccessible, but always inspiring. Hashimoto showed
that art and mathematics are the expression of the same fundamentally human
thirst for understanding. They are the
ultimate realization of the order and harmony in our Universe. Both are humankind’s greatest achievements –
the most spectacular realizations of man’s intellect.