This post is a third installment to the sequence that I started with The Truth About Mathematical Ability and Innate Mathematical Ability. I begin to discuss the role of aesthetics in math.

There was strong interest in the first two posts in my sequence, and I apologize for the long delay. The reason for it is that I've accumulated hundreds of pages of relevant material in draft form, and have struggled with how to organize such a large body of material. I still don't know what's best, but since people have been asking, I decided to continue posting on the subject, even if I don't have my thoughts as organized as I'd like. I'd greatly welcome and appreciate any comments, but I won't have time to respond to them individually, because I already have my hands full with putting my hundreds of pages of writing in public form.

Where I come from

My father is a remarkable creature, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have grown up around him. Amongst other things, we share a love of music. There's a fair amount of overlap in our musical tastes. But there's an important difference between us.

When a piece of music is complex, like a piano sonata or a symphony, I often need to listen to it repeatedly before I figure out what I like about it. When I share the piece with him that he's never heard before, he'll often highlight the parts that I like most in real time, on first listening, without my having said anything.

In the past, people would have attributed this to magic, or other supernatural constructs like telepathy. We now know that these explanations don't suffice.

You might hypothesize that the difference comes from him having greater abstract pattern recognition ability than my own. In fact, this is the case, but it doesn't suffice to account for the phenomenon. Some people with greater pattern recognition ability than me don't appreciate music at all. More significantly, my father doesn't figure out what I like by thinking about it – his reactions are instead emotionally rooted, for example, he broke into tears upon hearing the repetition of the original theme in the final movement of Beethoven's piano sonata Op. 109.

For whatever reason, my father's initial emotional responses are surprisingly often closely aligned with my eventual emotional responses than my ...

johnnycoconut

johnnycoconut

johnnycoconut

johnnycoconut