21 February 2026
The idea that the golden ratio has (or should have) an aesthetic role has a relatively short history.
20 February 2026
For Leonhard Euler, both proven and unproven results could be beautiful.
19 February 2026
‘The beautiful arrangement of their characters’
Observations on beauty in theorems by Leibniz.
18 February 2026
The cycloid, the tautochrone, and the brachistochrone
An enduring locus of mathematical beauty in the seventeenth century concerned curves like the cycloid and the catenary.
17 February 2026
Torricelli's solid, beauty, and sublimity
Infinite length, infinite surface area, finite volume, and aesthetic judgement.
16 February 2026
Fermat and the beauty of number theory
Number theory was the one area of mathematics on which Pierre de Fermat worked throughout his life, and he found it ‘very beautiful and very subtle’.
15 February 2026
Viète and an ‘elegant and very beautiful’ result
Or, how notation can influence aesthetic judgement.
14 February 2026
Cardano and beautiful properties of figures
Book XVI of Girolamo Cardano's De Subtilitate, a compendium of natural philosophy, begins by presenting sixty properties of geometrical figures, ‘outstanding in distinction and beauty and regard’.
13 February 2026
The discovery and rediscovery of the the polyhedra (other than the five regular solids) all the faces of which are regular polygons and where for each pair of vertices some symmetry transformation carries one vertex to the other.
12 February 2026
Luca Pacioli and the ‘divine proportion’
Pacioli’s book Divina proportione is famous in the history of mathematical beauty, but mostly for the wrong reasons.