Have you ever read a book or a poem or listened to a song or looked at a painting and thought to yourself how perfect it is? Have you ever looked at a landscape and pondered that it somehow resonates with you somewhere deep inside just because it is the way it is?
I don’t mean that these things are just pleasant to contemplate but that the way that these things are put together (whatever it is) are for lack of another word, perfect?
Well things like the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio do exist in nature and it seems many natural phenomena and living things use these ratios. Life seems to be able to express itself using math in various wonderful ways.
But I want to focus more on human arts. The way that you are sometimes reading a book and you read a passage and you stare at a sentence and marvel at the way it is put together. Every word carefully chosen, the structure just right. When you finish reading it the result is poetic or even melodic to your mind. Any change, any word substitution would ruin it and the result would seem off-balance.
I remember a sci-fi show years ago where an alien civilization came into contact with humans and were amazed at our music as they had no such concept of their own. They were a culture totally devoted to math. They valued the music not for the song contents but for the mathematical expression of the musical notes. To them this was a new way to appreciate numbers.
I sometimes wonder that if we were to express novels, or poems in some mathematical fashion that well written works would come out as well written and beautifully complex mathematical equations that balanced out.
Perhaps then maybe we too can be expressed as mathematical equations. Maybe if we were able to express our lives in terms of numbers and equations we could clearly see what was unbalanced or wrong and take steps to correct it. Would it be that easy? Would we even be happy if we knew how to do this? Or would we continue to live life as we have previously done so because to us the equation seems perfect no matter what the numbers say.
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