The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”

If you’ve tak­en a good art his­to­ry course on the Impres­sion­ists and Post-Impres­sion­ists, you’ve inevitably encoun­tered Vin­cent van Gogh’s 1889 mas­ter­piece “Star­ry Night,” which now hangs in the MoMA in New York City. The paint­ing, the muse­um writes on its web site, “is a sym­bol­ic land­scape full of move­ment, ener­gy, and light. The quiet­ness of the vil­lage con­trasts with the swirling ener­gy of the sky.… Van Gogh’s impas­to tech­nique, or thick­ly applied col­ors, cre­ates a rhyth­mic effect—the pic­ture seems to con­stant­ly move in its frame.” Artis­ti­cal­ly, van Gogh man­aged to cap­ture move­ment in a way that no artist had ever quite done it before. Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, it turns out, he was on to some­thing too. Just watch the new TED-ED les­son above, The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Night.”

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

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