Art or Science? You Make the Call

If you've been looking for yet another reason to fan the "is it art or is it science?" flame, take a look at the American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Imagery page. Now I don't know a lot about math, but I know what I like -- and that usually means a balanced checkbook. And let me tell you, there's an art to making that happen.

But in the grand scale of things, is mathematics an art or science? Don't answer that too quickly, at least not until you've had a look at math imagery like that of Robert J. Lang, an artistic mathematician who specializes in origami -- paper folding, in other words. Remember those paper airplanes you used to throw around in 4th grade? Forget it. Dr. Lang's mathematical origami isn't like that.

While his origami says he is an artist, Lang talks like an engineer. Which isn't a surprise, since he trained as physicist and holds 40 patents on semiconductor lasers, optics, and integrated optoelectronics. But here's what he has to say about origami:

The intersections between origami, mathematics, and science occur at many levels and include many fields of the latter. We can group these intersections into roughly three categories:

• Origami mathematics, which includes the mathematics that describes the underlying laws of origami;
• Computational origami, which comprises algorithms and theory devoted to the solution of origami problems by mathematical means;
• Origami technology, which is the application of origami (and folding in general) to the solution of problems arising in engineering, industrial design, and technology in general.

Origami math defines the "ground rules" for computational origami's goal of solving origami design problems (and quantifying their difficulty). The results of computational origami, in turn, can be (and have been) pressed into service to solve technological problems ranging from consumer products to the space program.

That sounds like a lot of engineering to me, even though his origami is unquestionably art. (This reminds me of a stained-glass window I commissioned from a local stained-glass artist a few years ago. It turns out that he was a trained aeronautical engineer, who incorporated aircraft engineering principles in his windows to add lightweight strength to large windows.)

But Lang isn't the only artist/engineer who blurrs the distinction between art and science, and he isn't the only artist/engineer you can see at the Mathematical Imagery page. So what do you think? Science or art? And have you changed your mind?

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:04 AM  Permalink