The Importance of Beauty in Science and Mathematics

Audio listeners, please note: This episode contains a lot more visuals than my usual podcasts. As always this can be found on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8 if you want the full experience. I'm referring to images and so on throughout, or the images are illustrating what I am saying without comment.

In this chapter we counter a number of prevailing views about the arts: the purposes of art and the possibility of objective standards of beauty. This leads to a discussion of the place of inexplicit knowledge when creating in the arts and how the "hard to vary" quality of explanations finds an analogue in the art. All of this discussion comes through the lens of beauty in nature and how flowers evolved to be attractive. But this attractive quality of flowers is not a mere matter of opinion for both insects and people find flowers attractive.