Member-only story
Mathematics and The Starry Night
The connection between turbulence and art
The Cypress tree, the sleepy village, the luminescent sky, and the rolling hills- that’s how we see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It was Van Gogh’s view from his east-facing bedroom on the first floor of Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Sanit-Rémy-de-Provence, where he admitted himself after the famous psychotic episode of self-mutilating his ear.
There are many curious aspects of The Starry Night. Painted in 1889 in June, the summer of France, it is the first painting that is named after the background rather than what is being depicted in the painting. It was the universe’s way of creeping into the artist’s vocabulary.
The Turbulence
Human brains have a habit of trying to find unique designs and patterns in the world around us. A few patterns are easy to find and a few are difficult. The turbulent flows in the field of Fluid Mechanics of the most bizarre things that exist in the universe, humans can recognise them but they haven’t understood them completely. Werner Heisenberg, the famous German Physicist, said, “When I meet God, I’m going to ask him two questions: Why relativity and why turbulence? I really think he’ll have an answer for the first.”
