Art is a Gift from God to Man Alone
Have you ever seen the pictures of so-called “art” created by zoo animals? Congo the chimpanzee has made over 400 paintings and drawings. Bini the Bunny has a YouTube channel where he paints with a brush in his mouth. A pig from South Africa, called “Pigcasso,” has made paintings that people have paid thousands of […]
Drawing the Line Somewhere
“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.” So said Theodor Adorno. But was he right? Adorno was a German philosopher and art theorist who believed that the purpose of art was not to reflect the beauty of creation or to express eternal truth—the purpose of art was to challenge and disrupt […]
Paint with Your Brains, not Your Hands
Michaelangelo Buonarotti once said that “[a] man paints with his brains and not with his hands.” Perhaps the greatest artist in human history, he is most famous for his painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as well as for his marble statues of David and the Pieta—a sculpture of Mary holding in her […]
There’s no Equation for Gladness
If I could tell how glad I was by Emily Dickinson If I could tell how glad I was I should not be so glad — But when I cannot make the Force, Nor mould it into Word, I know it is a sign That new Dilemna be From mathematics further off Than for Eternity. Math […]
Mathematics and the Wonder of Perfection
There has never been a perfect science experiment. Nobody has ever written the perfect novel. No system of government has ever achieved perfection, in form or execution. And despite what they say in baseball, nobody has ever played a truly perfect game in sports. So, is there anywhere in the world that true perfection actually […]
Mathematics and the Limits of Human Reason
Kurt Godel said, “Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.” I think he was right on both counts. Godel was an Austrian-born logician and mathematician whose work primarily in the 1920’s and 1930’s revolutionized our understanding of mathematical knowledge. He is perhaps most famous […]
The Beauty and Truth of Mathematics
Abraham Lincoln read it more than any other book, except the Bible. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem about its pure and simple beauty. “So, what has that to do with mathematics?” you might ask. The book is Euclid’s Elements—a mathematical treatise that is perhaps the most successful and influential textbook ever written…and it […]
Galileo Galilei: “[n]ature is written in the language of mathematics.”
A scientist, astronomer, and mathematician, Galileo was one of the great minds of the Renaissance. He also has a complicated history with the church that arose out of his defense of Copernican heliocentrism—the view that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe. But for all the drama of that disagreement, Galileo, […]
Benedict Arnold: There, but for the grace of God, go I
History often tempts us to view people one-dimensionally: Hero or villain. And while a person’s legacy may ultimately be one or the other, the story usually is not so simplistic. Often good gives way to bad; honor gives way to shame; single decisions can form a whole legacy. Benedict Arnold, perhaps the mostfamous traitor of […]
The History of our Own Lives—”in the sight of the Lord”
Yesterday we learned that Plutarch wrote biographies of the men of Greece and Rome. Historians throughout time have written grand histories—of World War II, of ancient Rome; of George Washington, and Cincinnatus; of lost civilizations, of kings, and popes and presidents. But the truth is, most of us in this room will never make a […]