The Sudden Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Evening”

In case you’ve tak­en a great artwork his­to­ry course on the Impres­sion­ists and Submit-Impres­sion­ists, you’ve inevitably encoun­tered Vin­cent van Gogh’s 1889 mas­ter­piece “Star­ry Night,” which now hangs within the MoMA in New York Metropolis. The paint­ing, the muse­um writes on its net­web site, “is a sym­bol­ic land­scape stuffed with transfer­ment, ener­gy, and light-weight. The quiet­ness of the vil­lage con­trasts with the swirling ener­gy of the sky.… Van Gogh’s impas­to tech­nique, or thick­ly utilized col­ors, cre­ates a rhyth­mic impact—the pic­ture appears to con­stant­ly transfer in its body.” Artis­ti­cal­ly, van Gogh man­aged to cap­ture transfer­ment in a means that no artist had ever fairly executed it earlier than. Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, it seems, he was on to some­factor too. Simply watch the brand new TED-ED les­son above, The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Evening.”

Cre­at­ed by math artist/trainer Natalya St. Clair and ani­ma­tor Avi Ofer, the video explores how “Van Gogh cap­tured [the] deep mys­tery of transfer­ment, flu­id and light-weight in his work,” and par­tic­u­lar­ly man­aged to depict the elu­sive phe­nom­e­non generally known as tur­bu­lence. In Star­ry Evening, the video observes, van Gogh depict­ed tur­bu­lence with a level of sophis­ti­ca­tion and accu­ra­cy that rivals the best way physi­cists and math­e­mati­cians have greatest defined tur­bu­lence in their very own sci­en­tif­ic papers. And, all of it hap­pened, per­haps by coin­ci­dence (?), dur­ing the tur­bu­lent final years of van Gogh’s life.

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this publish appeared on our web site in 2014.

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