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The Platonic Solid s and other Polyhedra are a recurring theme in Western art. Examples are:
Many of the works of artist M. C. Escher contain impossible constructions, made using geometrical objects that cannot exist but are pleasant to the human sight. Some of Escher's Tessellation drawings were inspired by conversations with the mathematician H. S. M. Coxeter concerning Hyperbolic Geometry . Relationships between the works of mathematician Kurt Gödel , artist M.C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach are explored in '' Gödel, Escher, Bach ,'' a Pulitzer Prize -winning book. The processing power of modern computers allows mathematicians and non-mathematicians to visualise complex mathematical objects such as the Mandelbrot Set . In the modern industry of Computer Animation , Fractal s play a key role in modelling mountains, fire, trees and other natural objects. See Fractal Art for examples of the use of these mathematical objects with only aesthetic motivations. See Low-complexity Art for Juergen Schmidhuber 's minimal art form explicitly based on short computer programs. Sculptor Helaman Ferguson has made sculptures in various materials of a wide range of complex Surface s and other Topological Objects . His work is motivated specifically by the desire to create visual representations of mathematical objects. Ferguson has created a sculpture (pdf) called ''The Eightfold Way'' at the Berkeley, California, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. A publication of the institute by the same title is a tribute to that sculpture, and the underlying mathematics that involves the Projective Special Linear Group PSL(2,7) , a finite group of 168 elements. A recent study published in '' Scientific American '' (December 2002) shows that an interesting property in Jackson Pollock 's art is that his works have a fractal dimension, which make them different from purely random strokes. LITERATURE AND FILM Mathematical themes and mathematicians have been featured in novels ( A Beautiful Mind ), plays ( Copenhagen ), Motion Pictures ( Pi ) and even an opera ( Fermat's Last Tango ). SEE ALSO
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