New research suggests the same part of the brain that responds to art and music is activated when a person who loves math looks at an "aesthetically pleasing" formula.
People find beauty in different things, such as a symphony or painting; this study looked at intellectual forms of beauty, a University College London news release reported.
Mathematicians tend to describe formulas in "emotive terms" and the feeling has been compared to how an art lover feels when they look upon a great work of art.
Researchers looked at the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 15 mathematicians' brains while they viewed mathematical formulae that they had previously rated based on aesthetics.
The researchers found mathematical beauty is experienced in the same part of the brain (the medial orbito-frontal cortex) as beauty based on music or art.
"To many of us mathematical formulae appear dry and inaccessible but to a mathematician an equation can embody the quintescence of beauty. The beauty of a formula may result from simplicity, symmetry, elegance or the expression of an immutable truth. For Plato, the abstract quality of mathematics expressed the ultimate pinnacle of beauty," Professor Semir Zeki, lead author of the paper from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL said in the news release. "This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such as highly intellectual and abstract."
Each study participant was given 60 mathematical formulae and asked to rate each one from negative five (meaning ugly) to positive five (beautiful).
The formulae most often rated as beautiful were "Leonhard Euler's identity, the Pythagorean identity and the Cauchy-Riemann equations," the news release reported. Srinivasa Ramanujan's infinite series and Riemann's functional equation were usually rated as "ugly."
"We have found that activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to - even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified," Zeki said. "We have found that, as with the experience of visual or musical beauty, the activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to be - even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, one which has been debated since classical times, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified."
