The Concinnitas Project

“Concinnitas” is the title of a portfolio of etchings organized by Bob Feldman of Parasol Press and curated by Dan Rockmore.  It is a collection of ten etchings with aquatint produced from the contributions of ten mathematicians and physicists in response to the prompt to transcribe their “most beautiful mathematical expression.”  The portfolio draws its name from a word used by the Renaissance architect, artist, philosopher and scholar, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) to connote the balance of number, outline, and position (in essence, number, geometry, and topology) that he believed characterize a beautiful work of art.  The portfolio has been shown around the world including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, each time giving new life to the question of “what is beautiful mathematics?” – asked both from the mathematical  and visual points of view. The Concinnitas artists are Michael Atiyah, Enrico Bombieri, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Karp, Peter Lax, David Mumford, Stephen Smale and Steven Weinberg.   As Philip Ording has written, the portfolio “makes clear that picturing math is a complex affair, in no small part because the meaning conveyed by a picture is a product of the historical and cultural contexts in which it appears – the Concinnitas portfolio displays some interesting contradictions.”