In this talk for 5x15 Marcus du Sautoy describes his frustration with the false dichotomy drawn between Art and Science. du Sautoy shows how mathematics, specifically prime numbers, can create effects in music and how these same primes are also featured in nature's evolutionary cycles. Aesthetics, he suggests, exist in mathematics – a mathematician, after all, is a maker of patterns, a creative artist. He or she does not work only with truths, but with choices, driven by the aesthetics and beauty of mathematics. Art and science, du Sautoy concludes, are two parts of the same equation.
"A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns.. I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art." GH Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
Sautoy talks about how artists and musicians are drawn to structures almost intuitively - as there is aesthetically something nice about them that retrospectively relates to mathematics.
For example, Arnold Schoenberg used a 12 tone system which incidentally created a symmetrical object that only exists in higher dimensional space and can therefore only be listened to.
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