Functional Versus Aesthetic
June 15, 2013
While the idea of the functional aesthetic is popular in contemporary art, there is an unsurprising parallel to math. Both artistic mediums like metal and paint in addition to numbers on a page are in the end both symbols. A blog called The Old New Thing posted a thought-provoking article called “Mathematical Formulas are Designed to be Pretty Not to be Suitable for Computation.”
According to the article, mathematicians are concerned with the elegance and formatting of equations – sometimes to the point where function matters less.
The author points to a few ways that he sees a solution to this issue developing:
“Often people will ask for an efficient way of calculating factorials, when in fact they don’t really need factorials (which is a good thing, because that would require a bignum package); they are really just trying to evaluate a formula that happens to be expressed mathematically with factorials (because factorials are pretty). Another place pretty formulas prove unsuitable for computation is in Taylor series. The denominator of a Taylor series is typically a factorial, and the numerator can get quite large, too. For example, exp(x) = ? x? ? n!.”
It appears that computational needs and math may not be congruent. Both the big picture and the nitty gritty of what the author points to in this article could be quite a shock for some in the analytics sci fi game.
Megan Feil, June 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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