It may be Keats’ most famous pair of lines:<\/p>\n
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,\u2014that is all <\/a> I believe he’s right on the money. I think that when we experience beauty, it’s because we have seen a little deeper into the nature of things.<\/p>\n This seems especially true of mathematical beauty<\/a>. I had a college friend who found math exquisitely beautiful. He bought a blackboard for his room, and stayed up until all hours, glorying in the work. Elegance, simplicity (but not too much!<\/a>), \u00a0and beauty are important guidelines to the rightness of a solution or direction of research. A sense of beauty guides the scientist as well as the artist. I’m really familiar with this from my engineering career.<\/p>\n So there is the nugget of my own epiphany:<\/p>\n The beauty of music is the beauty of mathematics, perceived in real time.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n We see this in its visual manifestations all the time. The curve<\/a> of the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge, the pattern of seeds<\/a> in the sunflower, the rings of Saturn<\/a> — all clear manifestations of the way the universe works, that can be described by math, and that we find beautiful.<\/p>\n Music presents a pure, distilled form of this: beauty created by small, whole numbers and their relationships to each other.<\/p>\n
\n Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’<\/a><\/p>\n