Beauty At Work What’s Beautiful About Mathematics? With Dr. Carlo Lancellotti
Carlo Lancellotti is a Professor of Mathematics at the College of Staten Island and a faculty member in the Physics Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His field of scholarship is mathematical physics, with a special emphasis on the kinetic theory of plasmas and gravitating systems. He has published in a variety of journals, including Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, the Journal of Statistical Physics, Chaos, the Journal of Transport Theory, and Statistical Physics. He has also translated into English and published three volumes of works by the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce. Lancellotti has also written essays of his own on Del Noce and other topics, which have appeared in Communio, Public Discourse, Church Life Journal, First Things, and other outlets.
In this episode, we talk about:
- Beauty, structure, and harmony and their role in the study of mathematics.
- The aesthetic criteria used by some mathematicians.
- The beauty found in the Boltzmann equation.
- Beauty and truth in simplicity and consistency—understanding reality through math.
- The limitations of mathematics in what it can tell us about reality.
- Mathematicians and the Platonic world of ideas.
- Appreciating the beauty in mathematics—how beauty can help encourage the study of math.
- Understanding math is a necessity in learning art.
Resources mentioned:
David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order:
https://www.amazon.com/Wholeness-Implicate-Order-David-Bohm/dp/0415289793
The Redemption of Scientific Reason by Carlo Lancelloti
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-redemption-of-scientific-reason/
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