Experiencing meanings in geometry

David W. Henderson

Daina Taimina

pp. 58-83

in: Nathalie Sinclair, David Pimm, William Higginson (eds), Mathematics and the aesthetic, Berlin, Springer, 2007

Abstract

What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences, and principles of order observed in visible things? Consider, even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the bodily sense the products of the art of painting do not see the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred by recognizing in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth - the very experience out of which Love rises. (Plotinus, The Enneads, II.9.16; 1991, p. 129)