Mathematical Equations: Sculptures of art, poetry and science

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

These are the words of John Keats, English romantic poet. They are the last lines of his poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ written in 1819, just two years before his death.

Though perhaps not what John Keats had in mind when he distilled his thoughts on paper, it can be conceived of as an aphorism of the ‘silent form’ of the mathematics underlying the physical world of scientific thought which ‘shalt remain’ beyond our own generation, perhaps even for eternity.

Artist and writer, Matthew Collings, who admitted that he left school at age thirteen to make his own way in the world, has interviewed top scientists about the five most famous equations in science, including Stephen Hawking’s Entropy Equation. During the interviews, as Matthew’s knowledge of these equations increases and the mathematical and scientific meanings behind them become clearer, he wonders if the concept of artistic beauty has any relevance to the world of mathematics. In response, Oxford professor and astrophysicist, Pedro Ferreira, quoted Einstein. Paraphrased, Einstein said that, as a theoretical physicist, the end game for him was ‘experience’ or practical significance but what guided him was the search for mathematical beauty or mathematical simplicity. Witness the penultimate simplicity of Einstein’s equation:   - published in 1905. It is a linear equation (c is a constant) with one independent variable (mass of a body m )  and one dependent variable ( the body’s equivalent ‘mass’ in the form of energy E  ). Graphically, it may be represented as a line in the Euclidean plane, passing through the origin with slope  . It is sooooooo …. simple and yet it is a universal truth that encapsulates one of the most fundamental and profound relationships in the laws governing our universe and our existence.

For more on the beauty of mathematics, watch and ponder:   Beautiful Equations   (Courtesy of the BBC)

Last Updated by SAS October 07, 2026, 16:00:46