Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics
By Virginia Malone
The passions for science, mathematics, engineering, and art are driven by the same desire; the desire to discover the beauty in one’s world. This desire of the human mind provides the energy for both the maintenance and evolution of the web formed by these disciplines. The desire causes the emergence of technologies that are at once are the products of web interactions and tools for new developments.
The fine arts can be useful as in da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man, or they can cause us to see the world in new ways as in van Gogh’s Starry Night, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, or Edwin Abbotts’ Flatland. Art can be a product when integrated into the presentation of data as described in Edward Tufte’s, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Art is also integrated into technologies as engineers go from crude designs to finished products, the importance of the impact on our senses is included is an integral part of engineering new designs. From model T Ford to the latest concept car, we see the evolution of technology is as much about esthetics of the product as its functionality.
The fine arts use the products of mathematics, science, and technology to increase the range of their own products. New tools beyond the wildest dream of the artist including air brushes, music synthesizers, moving stages, and computer programs are now common place. New discoveries in mathematics and science open the mind of artists to new vistas from fractals to the universe as technology puts more within the grasp of the artist.
The human mind provides the energy that at one time divides our world into science, mathematics, engineering, and art and at the same time unites them all into a single web of intertwined investigations and technologies of our world. Each mind finds different links in this web. Each mind discovers the beauty of the world in its own way. Each mind expresses its own unique view, some to keep for personal use and some to share with others.
When you try to change any single thing, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
--John Muir
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.
—Marcel Proust