11 August

Brian Rotman studies the physical roots of mathematics. One of his passions is to ‘take the God out of mathematics’. By which he means the number of ways people have taken the patterns of mathematics to derive from somewhere outside the world. There’s always been an association between magical thinking and maths, for this reason, extending to gambling, numerology and even cosmology. Mathematical patterns and truths seem to exist separately to people. Rotman traces the ways this magical thinking starts. How the actual everyday, ‘physical’ origins of mathematics get forgotten. One of those ways is perspective drawing, one of art’s little society missiles that led to whole generations of people, up until today, feeling that reality can be ‘captured’ on a sheet of paper or screen. Once you believe that, and lose track of how that actually works, the next step to entirely separate transcendental spaces, through the ‘vanishing point’, is much easier.