David Mumford | Math & Beauty & Brain Areas

Two questions about the general nature of math have a certain interest to the larger public: mathematicians like to talk of a 'beautiful result' but what does this mean?; and is there a special part of cortex which is highly active when people do math? Recently Professors Michael Atiyah and Semir Zeki have put these two questions together, collaborating on an astonishing experimental investigation of these questions entitled "The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates". Fifteen mathematicians were scanned using fMRI while viewing 60 mathematical formulas and rating them as ugly, neutral or beautiful. All 60 equations are shown in the sidebar, in 6 jpegs: you can magnify them by clicking. Their main result is that activity in the mOFC = medial (near the centerline) orbital (in the inward curl of the cortex above the eyes) frontal cortex correlates to some extent with their judgement of beauty (though strangely activity in mOFC relative to baseline diminishes). My ai

Two questions about the general nature of math have a certain interest to the larger public: mathematicians like to talk of a 'beautiful result' but what does this mean?; and is there a special part of cortex which is highly active when people do math? Recently Professors Michael Atiyah and Semir Zeki have put these two questions together, collaborating on an astonishing experimental investigation of these questions entitled "The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates". Fifteen mathematicians were scanned using fMRI while viewing 60 mathematical formulas and rating them as