The magic of numbers

Fibonacci helps. Leonardo Fibonacci who lived right around the time of the European Renaissance, 1200s, devised a number sequence that is understood to be a primary root to classical proportions. The sequence is easy to recreate. Start with 1. The next number is still one. Now add the previous 2 numbers and keep doing it to get the next numbers. They go: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 until infinity.

What do the numbers mean? If you go by classical principles they can be applied to anything requiring beautiful proportions: windows, cars, sculpture, painting, prose, poetry, even music. And the use of the numbers survive to these post-modern times. Designers still use them. They are still fundamental lessons taught in most textbooks of art and design though more than 2 millennia have passed since they were first used by builders and sculptors of ancient times.

So why numbers? What is in numbers that seems so magical? We need numbers to describe our world. To make sense of anything we need to count everything in number of hours, days, weeks, months, the cycles of the planets, the stars, the next time a particular comet returns. We count even those things we cannot see. We count electrons, protons, neutrons, molecules, etc. If it cannot be counted, does it really exist?

And so it was not unexpected that the ancients should have thought there must be numbers that can be applied as well to the problem of beauty. After all, the ancients were stone builders. To cut stone for building anything they must first of all have to devise the system for telling stone cutters exactly what size of stone to cut. So why shouldn’t there be a mathematical system for making things beautiful?

And so they observed the natural world. They measured human anatomy, measured leaves and eggs and came up with their “secret” numbers, the golden section, the phi, the pentagon, the angles on each of its 5 arms. They aspired for these measures in everything that they built. And if you asked them why, they might have said: That is how the One-God has constructed the universe. The numbers are there. And we must simply search for them. And the search includes looking for ways to apply the magical numbers of the ancients to everything that we do.

It is not unexpected that by the time of Fibonacci these numbers and the knowledge of them would have made the whole discipline of building anything from art to architecture into a discipline accessible only to a select few. By the 1700s, these select few had become institutionalized into the “Salon”. The group of elders in France practically decided what was or was not universally beautiful.

Yet the world was headed for great change. Modernism would transform the world into a system more responsive to the individual and less dominated by institutions of the elite. Many of the early modernists considered themselves “anti-intellectual”, translated: “anti-Salon”. They were rebels and individualists even though many of them still studied the magic numbers albeit secretly. Even so, they believed, besides the numbers there was also such a thing as “intuition”.

Rather than make art “by numbers”, so to speak, they plumbed the depths of their own souls looking for what to them “felt” beautiful. They coined a new word. They said “aesthetic” and it fueled a revolution.

In remembering those times from the more educated perspective of the here and now, we realize, modernism was not really an argument against those numbers. In understanding these things in the light of history we may say now: The numbers are not out there in the universe to be measured but also inside us. And if we must measure, then we must measure in units so personal that words would fail us if we wanted to fully describe them. We can, each of us, immediately tell when something is pleasurable to our faculty of taste. And for the artist or the designer or the writer, it manifests in the ability to intuit.

But this does not mean that there is no use for studying the numbers. After all, intuition too also requires its own manner of education. Fibonacci still helps.

Yet it is true that the mastery of numbers is perhaps less important than the mastery of intuitive action. And so we approach the doing of art without thinking. Or at least not with the same thinking that a scientist might employ in asserting his of her own assertions testing them repeatedly until they become replicable in a laboratory, until they become in other words empirical. Artists feel no obligation to assert the truth that is out there in the universe. They feel no obligation at all to explain themselves. They obligate themselves only to saying and always with individual finality: This is for me the beautiful.