DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE STRESSED RIGHT NOW. It’s kind of deep. 🙂
Are you good at math? If so I admire you, as I admire someone who can play the piano or speak seven languages. Maybe more; with a lot of effort I could learn to play the piano or speak seven languages, but when confronted with math my mind goes blank.
So math and I could just leave each other alone, if only I had never encountered fractals, a kinky sort of geometry (?) that calculates the beautiful patterns found in nature; the thumbprint of God, the order behind the seeming chaos in the universe.
Now I see fractals everywhere-in the repeating patterns of leaf veins, mountain ranges from satellite photos, neural pathways in our brains! There is order in the universe, I tell you…maybe I could figure it out. If only I could do the math.
I feel like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, molding his mashed potatoes into a mountain shape and insisting, “This MEANS something,” much to the alarm of his family. It does mean something, but I can’t do the math.
But then Vincent van Gogh couldn’t do the math, either, and he painted turbulence, something scientists have recently discovered that is “real.” Van Gogh saw through; he saw turbulence a long time ago, as in his famous work, Starry Night.
The stars are spinning, like the Hindu wheel of time or the mysterious wheel within a wheel Ezekiel saw in a vision.
But maybe I should leave it alone…the geniuses who worked on the mathematics of infinity all went mad and Van Gogh was in a mental institution when he painted Starry Night.
Maybe what we think of as opposites, math vs art, science vs religion-maybe they aren’t opposites at all. Maybe they are spokes on a slowly spinning wheel?
Hats off to you mathematicians and to you creative types>>>
Maybe we’re not as crazy as people sometimes think we are. 🙂
Hint hint: I love comments. 🙂
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