Feel the math

Galileo’s mathematics came from different sources in the arts, says Professor Mark Peterson

What could be the connection between Galileo and the arts? Professor Mark Peterson gave us a glimpse of it in his talk Galileo’s Sources in the Arts at the National Institute of Arts and Society, IISC campus. “Galileo was a master of visual argument,” said Professor Peterson to an intimate gathering of scientists and artists while showing an etching of the half moon by Galileo. The moon had a big crater right in the middle.

“He would have learnt the mathematics of drawing,” added the professor explaining how his scientific vision could have been enriched by this knowledge.

Galileo Galilei was a polymath, astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher and mathematician born in Italy. He is well-known for his contributions to science and believed in the Copernican theory of the sun-centered solar system. But what is Galileo best known for is the invention of telescope.

Professor Peterson who teaches mathematics and physics at Mount Holyoke College, USA, has written

Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts . The lanky professor expressed that Galileo was deeply interested in arts. In his school years, he revealed, Galileo considered being an artist.

Not just painting, the famous astronomer was also fascinated by Dante's Inferno , a classic in Western literature. Boticelli’s famous drawing The Map of Hell is based on Galileo's Inferno .

Emphasising the interface between various disciplines, Professor Peterson spoke of Lodovico Cardi, an Italian painter and architect also known as Cigoli who referenced Galileo’s lectures at the University of Pisa in his painting.

If it was perspective painting in visual arts and Inferno in literature, it was the Pythagorean theory of music by Franchinus Gaffurius that became one of Galileo’s several sources in the arts. The renaissance composer had in his path-breaking work Theorica Musicae (1492) elucidated on Pythagoras exploring harmony and ratio with various musical instruments. Galileo discovered the meaning of this ancient story about Pythagoras by experiment.

“We hear music but to understand it, we need proportion of Pythagoras. We see a painting but to understand it, we need perspective theory,” said the scholar. He added, “The biographers probably don't tell us about these various sources in the arts because they didn’t think them to be going anywhere.” Professor Peterson also mentioned a rare book Oration in Praise of Mathematics by Galileo’s his closest student Niccolo Aggiunti which dealt with a new philosophy of mathematics.