How to cultivate great taste
.. and why it's more important than you think
You are going to spend 30 minutes reading this. Listen to this music as you go along. Trust me, it is connected to the piece, just not in ways you may think.
In 1935, a letter appeared on the desk of Élie Cartan, a distinguished French mathematician. The letter was from a colleague, André Weil, who was introducing a reclusive mathematician, Nicolas Bourbaki. Weil submitted an article on Bourbaki’s behalf for publication in the journal Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences (Proceedings of the French Academy of Sciences). Nicolas was a former lecturer at the Royal University of Besse in Poldavia, who was now living in the grief of his country being wiped off the map of Europe. He not only lost his job but also almost all of his money during the dissolution of his country. Nicolas ended up making some money by giving lessons in belote, a card game at which he was a master, at a cafe in the Paris suburb of Clichy. Weil had to go through a significant amount of persuasion to have Nicolas discuss his mathematical ideas with him, and out came a contribution to modern integration theory.
Weil implored Cartan to consider the work, if only as a nominal contribution from a disenchanted mathematician.
Eventually, the article appeared under the title "On a Theorem of Carathéodory and Measure in Topological Spaces" and was signed Nicolas Bourbaki. What Élie Cartan did not realise is that he had launched one of the most storied careers in the world of mathematics.
Bourbaki went on and published a large series of textbooks meant to advance pure mathematics. The series is known collectively as the Elements of Mathematics, and topics included set theory, abstract algebra, topology, analysis, Lie groups, and Lie algebras.
The most distinctive feature of Bourbaki was the writing style: rigorous, formal and stripped to the logical studs. The books spelt out mathematical theorems from the ground up without skipping any steps, exhibiting an unusual degree of thoroughness among mathematicians.
But Bourbaki’s contributions went beyond mathematics. His thorough approach to the subject met with the curiosity of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in New York, whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology.
Structuralism, in turn, went on to fundamentally influence other fields. The structuralist mode of reasoning has since been applied in anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics, and architecture.
Bourbaki’s work became the bridge between the various cultural movements of the time. He provided a simple and relatively precise definition of concepts and structures, which philosophers and social scientists believed was fundamental within their disciplines and in bridging different areas of knowledge.
There was just one tiny problem.
It was hard to meet Nicolas Bourbaki. He was so reclusive that only a handful of mathematicians had ever met him.
I mean, how can you meet a man who does not exist?
Nicolas Bourbaki was a figment of imagination, an elaborate hoax which went on for decades, spanned continents (from India to the US) and engulfed countless mathematicians (and you thought the world of mathematics was boring?).
So then, who wrote all of Nicolas Bourbaki’s mathematics?
Nicolas Bourbaki, the most famous mathematician who never existed
Nicolas Bourbaki was the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure (ENS), including Henri Cartan, who urged André Weil to prank his father, Élie Cartan, by sending the letter. Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally intended to prepare a new textbook in analysis.
Their motivations were simple - Bourbaki members were dissatisfied with the field’s textbooks and wanted to create better ones.
In the mathematics department, it was customary to play pranks on first-years. One of those pranks was to pretend that General Bourbaki would arrive and visit the school and maybe give an obscure talk about mathematics. The name was borrowed from a real-life 19th-century French general who never had anything to do with mathematics.
But why perpetuate the hoax in the first place?
In the early 20th century, the First World War affected Europeans of all professions and social classes, including mathematicians and male students who fought and died on the front lines. For example, the French mathematician Gaston Julia, a pioneer in the study of fractals, lost his nose during the war and wore a leather strap over the affected part of his face for the rest of his life.
The deaths of students resulted in a lost generation in the French mathematical community; the estimated proportion of mathematics students (and French students generally) who died in the war ranges from one-quarter to one-half. Bourbaki founder André Weil remarked in his memoir Apprenticeship of a Mathematician that France and Germany took different approaches with their intelligentsia during the war: while Germany protected its young students and scientists, France instead committed them to the front, owing to the French culture of egalitarianism.
The prank, too, was egalitarian, for it took cross-continental proportions.
The creation of Bourbaki and the idea of an outlandish pseudonym induced a group of mathematicians at Princeton University to carry out their hoax. Among them were postdoctoral fellows Ralph P. Boas and John Tukey, as well as the English mathematician Frank Smithies, who visited Princeton from 1937 to 1938. Together, they revived an old Gottingen joke by developing several mathematical methods for - Lion Hunting. They published a spirited article titled A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big-Game Hunting (I am serious, the paper still exists).
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as Bourbaki's fame and production reached its peak, imitations, extensions, and recollections of the original hoax abounded.1
One such movement was Oulipo, roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature". It was a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who sought to create works using constrained writing techniques. The members, known as Oulipians, described themselves as rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.
Oulipians were considered the proponents of literary bondage. Their fundamental belief is that writing is always constrained by something, be it simply time or language itself. The solution, in their view, is not to try to abolish constraints, but to acknowledge their presence and embrace them proactively.
But it was not a merely philosophical take. For one of its members, Georges Perec, it was personal. In 1969, he published La Disparition (literally translates to The Disappearance). The book has one single constraint. The letter e is forbidden. In most European languages, e is the most challenging letter to omit, because it is the most common. In French, more than one-sixth of the letters in the normal text are e (including its accented versions é, è, ê and ë).
Perec was orphaned in the Second World War - his father was killed in action and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust. The absence of e in his entire book meant that Perec cannot say the words père (father), mère (mother), parents, famille (family) in his novel, nor could he write the name Georges Perec.
Each void in the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential void that Perec grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood.
In essence, La Disparition was a meditation on loss. It was a response to the constraint inflicted upon him - of losing the people he loved.
The Bourbakis and the Oulipians both dealt with constraints. The former responded by liberating from it, the latter responded by enforcing it.
And yet both of them were prolifically creative. Because while their response to constraints differed, they were united in their dissatisfaction.
We are creative because we are dissatisfied. With ourselves, with our sub-cultures and the world around us.
All progress, whether in the arts or the sciences, comes from the ferment which dissatisfaction causes within us. Through our hands and minds, we create work that aims to alleviate that dissatisfaction, which fuels curiosity.
But before curiosity comes dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction is what leads to Bourbaki and Oulipians. It leads to what the English musician and songwriter Brian Eno describes as the Scenius.
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like a genius. Your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you.
Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.
Scenius is the phenomenon which lays down the conditions for taste to emerge.2
To further understand how taste emerges, we turn to the reason why the internet exists - in the service of cats.
Pólya’s Cats and Recursion
Imagine you are in a large room with white and brown cats. You don’t know how many are white and how many are brown. Imagine if you randomly pick up one cat and note its colour. You then put the cat back and add one more cat of the same colour to the room (Trust the cat distribution system to help you find new cats). And then do the same thing over and over again.
Sounds simple, no?
As
says in their postThe damn thing’s behaviour is fiendishly complicated. Students — and teachers — have been tortured ever since. Whole books have been written about these models, many books, and thousands and thousands of papers. The extended forms of such models are connected to hundreds of disparate ideas in statistics.
But why?
They go on to explain
Things happen sequentially, and what happens the next time you pick a cat is deeply connected with what happened before. The world inside the room is always changing. I cannot observe it, but that I adulterate it, that in fact I change it forever.
Of course, mathematicians did not talk about cats, nor did the writer of the above lines. They talk about balls in an urn, but it’s a lot more fun to imagine all mathematical problems with cats. This particular (non-cat) model, suggested by George Pólya, is known as the Pólya Urn.
Pólya was an outrageously prolific mathematician. He published more than 58 scientific papers across probability, combinatorics, analysis and mathematical physics. From 1930-1932 alone, Polya published papers in German, French and English; his native language was Hungarian.3
At the heart of picking and replacing different coloured cats, and Pólya Urns, are two ideas, and one of them is Recursion
Recursion is the idea that the current state of anything is defined by its previous state.
The idea is central to how taste is built. Past actions are not merely repeated, they are reinterpreted and adapted in new contexts, leading to a dynamic and evolving cultural landscape.
Recursion, when combined with dissatisfaction, gives us something unique. And for that, let’s return to Bourbaki.
The man who loved roughness in nature
For its significant influence on pure mathematics, not everyone was happy with Bourbaki. One of its members, Benoit Mandelbrot, began having a fundamental disconnect. He studied and loved geometry, which relied on visualising complex systems and patterns in nature, often building on visual representations and geometric insights.
This approach clashed with Bourbaki's emphasis on abstract mathematics, which sometimes gave visualisation and geometric thinking a cold shoulder. He also perceived a dismissive attitude towards other areas of mathematics and a sense of intellectual superiority within the group.
Mandelbrot eventually moved to the United States, joining the research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Centre in New York. It was, in part, a way to distance himself from the intellectual climate and influence of Bourbaki in France. He sought a more open environment where his visual and geometric approach could be embraced.
In his 35 years of research work, he made a groundbreaking contribution to not just mathematics. One single idea, developed, understood and explored over decades influenced fields as statistical physics, meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, anatomy, taxonomy, neurology, linguistics, information technology, computer graphics, economics, geology, medicine, physical cosmology, engineering, chaos theory, econophysics, metallurgy, and the social sciences (Yes, I know you glossed over the list).
Fractals.
Now, if you have never heard of fractals, let’s start with a gentle introduction and look at this sunflower.
If you look at the centre of this sunflower, you will see a spiralling pattern. A sunflower pattern can be created by a simple repetitive process. Assume that it starts with a seed in the middle. Rotate it by a certain angle and create another seed. Then rotate again by the same angle and form a third seed. If one keeps rotating by the same angle and adding seeds, it will form a spiral that will keep growing in scale and distance from the centre.
This pattern can be found throughout nature, in many flowers, pinecones, strawberries and pineapples.
And there is one thing common to them, which was first discovered in ancient India and introduced to the Western world by an Italian mathematician.
Look at spirals of seeds in the centre of a sunflower and you'll observe patterns curving left and right. If you count these spirals and keep noting down your observations, only certain numbers will emerge.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610
This set of numbers is known as the Fibonacci sequence. Each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.
If you revisit the sunflower image and divide the spirals into those pointed left and right. Count them and you'll get two consecutive Fibonacci numbers.
What is the point of this?
The Fibonacci sequence is an example of recursion. The previous two numbers decide the next number, and it’s found all over in nature.
Conceptually, this is exactly what Mandelbrot discovered - Fractals.
Fractals are complex geometric shapes characterised by repeating patterns at different scales, often exhibiting self-similarity. They are generated by repeating a simple process iteratively, resulting in intricate structures that appear similar at various levels of magnification.
Let’s simplify this.
The Infinite Coastline of the World
Imagine you are looking at the map of an island. If you had to calculate the length of its coastline, you would measure it on the map, multiply it by the scale, and have the answer.
How accurate would you be?
Turns out, you could be way off the mark.
The coastline paradox is a concept that describes the counterintuitive observation that the length of a coastline is not a fixed quantity, but rather depends on the scale at which it is measured. At smaller scales, more details of the coastline are revealed, resulting in a longer measured length. Conversely, at larger scales, many of these details are smoothed out, resulting in a shorter measured length.
Below is an example of the coastline paradox on Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia.
In this example, you can see that the more the coastline is generalised, as would happen at larger scale maps, the coastline length decreases. Conversely, the more detailed you made the map, say, if you zoomed in on a particular bay, more detail would become obvious, and the coastline length would increase.
The coastline paradox arises from the fractal nature of coastlines.4
Fractals are at the heart of how taste is created.
Taste is individual - each time we consume and engage with a cultural artefact, we send out a signal. We then seek more of what we like - books, movies and even people.
Taste is cultural - Each time we send out a signal, the algorithm processes it and starts showing us similar things. Enough of us doing this kickstarts the journey of the signal becoming a part of culture.
Just like fractals, zooming into cultural taste would uncover individual taste. Zooming into individual taste would uncover the thoughts and ideas of each individual.
Just like how the coastline is built by each grain of sand, taste is built by each individual.
But if taste is cultural, how does one explain the ebb and flow of trends and tastes? If recursion says that the current state of taste defines its future state, what are the rules?
To understand the rules, we return to Pólya’s Cats.
Pólya’s Cats and Conditionality
Remember Pólya’s cats? The cat you pick first impacts the cat you would pick the next time around - that’s recursion.
The second idea deeply embedded in Pólya’s cats is the idea of conditionality. It means that a certain outcome can emerge only if a prior condition is fulfilled.
A higher chance of choosing an orange cat the second time can only emerge if an orange cat was picked the first time.
Now, think about Bourbaki and Mandelbrot - Bourbaki happened because they were dissatisfied with French mathematics. Fractals happened because Mandelbrot was dissatisfied with Bourbaki. Had Mandelbrot not moved away from France and joined the IBM research centre, he would not have found the impetus, the environment to immerse himself in geometry and the visual approach to mathematics.
Consider drawing the image you see above for any form of art you love - I am sure you can chart a similar evolution.
Take Jazz music for example - It originated in the late-19th to early-20th century. It developed out of many forms of music, including blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. It also incorporated interpretations of American and European classical music, entwined with African and slave folk songs and the influences of West African culture.
But all of it could not have happened without the legacy of slavery and segregation. This necessitated the need for new forms of musical expression amongst African American communities.
The evolution of Jazz had a turning point owing to the Second World War. Conscription shortened the number of musicians available; the military's need for shellac (commonly used for pressing gramophone records) limited record production; and a shortage of rubber (also due to the war effort) discouraged bands from touring via road travel. This led to the reduction in the size of jazz bands, and eventually led to the bebop style of jazz.
In this incomplete history of Jazz, you can see two stages of evolution already.
Conditionality is the other way in which taste is shaped.
And its not about ideal conditions. It’s often the constraints - of the material and emotional kind which shape taste.
Slavery, segregation and World War II shaped Jazz. Stifling French mathematical culture shaped Fractals. Perec’s personal loss of his family shaped La Disparition.
Constraints are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for taste to emerge. But they imbibe taste with an important property: Direction
To understand how direction influences taste, we turn to Buddhism.
The Buddhist Philosophy of ‘With and Against the Grain’
The Buddhist idea of Conditionality is known as Pratītyasamutpāda, or Dependent Arising. In other words, nothing exists independently; everything is interconnected and conditioned by multiple causes and conditions (This I am sure you agree with, because I have been saying this for the last 15 minutes!)
But if we go one level deeper, Buddhism makes a profound distinction - About being ‘With the grain’ (anuloma) and ‘Against the grain’ (pratiloma).
Simply put
‘With the grain’ (anuloma) is the natural, forward progression of conditionality that leads to the arising of suffering. It describes how, when certain conditions are present, they give rise to subsequent links in a causal chain, ultimately resulting in the experience of suffering (duḥkha).
This is our default mode of existence. The unexamined life, just going with the flow.
‘Against the grain’ (pratiloma) means reversing the causal chain of suffering by uprooting ignorance and craving, thereby breaking the cycle of dependent arising and leading toward liberation.
Now, bear with me, and apply the idea of ‘With and Against the Grain’ to the development of taste, and we will begin the journey of cultivating personal taste.
The Mathematician with a Gmail ID, who solved the Einstein Problem
In November 2022, David Smith, a retired paint technician, was spending time on his favourite activity: Playing with shapes. He had long loved jigsaw puzzles, road maps and fractals. He would often cut different shapes in cardboard and arrange them in varying shapes. In particular, he was fascinated with what is known in mathematics as a ‘Tiling problem’.
If you take a floor and cover it with tiles, you would have ‘periodic’ tiles. Like having square tiles cover a floor. All tiles fit perfectly, and the pattern is repeatable.
However, if you have the shape of a tile, such that when arranged in a certain manner, there are no repetitive patterns, you would have an ‘aperiodic tile’. Effectively, it means that if you had an infinite floor, you would never see a recurring pattern.
It was an open problem for over 50 years to either find such a tile or show that none exists.
Mathematicians have been searching for a tile like that since the 1960s, when Robert Berger constructed a set of 20,426 shapes that, combined, aperiodically tile the floor. Berger’s work set off a race to construct smaller aperiodic tile sets, culminating in Roger Penrose’s discovery in the 1970s of sets containing just two aperiodic tiles.
However, no one had success in finding that one aperiodic tile that would lead to a non-repeatable pattern. Ludwig Danzer, a German geometer, playfully dubbed such a tile an “einstein” — a pun on the German phrase “ein stein,” which means “one piece.”
And then, in November 2022, the amateur, the hobbyist David Smith, stunned the world of mathematics.
Using a software package called the PolyForm Puzzle Solver, he constructed a humble-looking hat-shaped tile. He then experimented to see how much of the screen he could fill with copies of that tile, without overlaps or gaps.
Usually, when he created tiles, they would either settle into some repeating pattern or fail to tile much of the screen. But the hat tile seemed to do neither. Smith cut out 30 copies of the hat on cardboard and assembled them on a table. Then he cut out 30 more and kept going. “I noticed that it was producing a tessellation that I had not seen before,” he said. “It was a tricky little tile.”
He sent a description of his tile to Craig Kaplan, an acquaintance and computer scientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who immediately started investigating its properties.
On 20th March 2023, Smith and Kaplan, together with two more researchers, announced that the hat tile (see image above) was an example of a single aperiodic tile.
“It was hiding in plain sight,” said Doris Schattschneider, an emerita mathematics professor at Moravian University in Pennsylvania. She described herself as “flabbergasted.”
In the days since the announcement, mathematicians and tiling hobbyists rushed to get their hands on the new tiles, making paper cutouts, 3D-printing them, and making hat quilts and cookies. The excitement the tiles had generated felt “a bit surreal,” said Smith, who lives in the coastal town of Bridlington in northern England. “I’m not used to this kind of thing.”
But Smith was not done.
Smith made another discovery: a second tile, shaped like a turtle, that also appeared to be aperiodic. “The idea of identifying two Einsteins back-to-back seemed too good to be true,” the researchers wrote.
By mid-January 2023, Smith and Kaplan had enlisted two more researchers. They started devoting all their spare time to the hat tile, and in just over a week, they had proved that the turtle tile too is aperiodic. “We were all pretty blown away by how quickly he nailed this all down,” Kaplan said.5
By finding not one, but two aperiodic tiles, Smith had added an entirely new method of looking at the tiling problem.
If you look up the affiliation (the universities they work at) of the authors of these papers, David Smith has none and uses his Gmail ID instead. His breakthrough, meanwhile, has professional mathematicians scratching their heads.
Smith is not done. He continues to explore the artistic possibilities of aperiodic tiles and figure out how to use colours to bring out the patterns.
Smith was able to prove what experts could not, because his taste had direction.
He was not interested in everything, even in math. He had spent years, maybe even decades, playing around with tiles and jigsaws. He was specifically interested in tiles.
He was not in it for fame or glory. He was in it for fun.
Taste is a vector.
It requires a seriousness, a dedication to the process of pursuing the subject of your interest.
It does not have to be all-consuming, but it has to be directed and focused.
Taste will not arise from reading AI-generated summaries of books, watching reviews of films or having surface-level discussions with friends over a cup of coffee.
The internet, in all its glory, gave us deep, immediate access to everything we wanted - Subtitled world cinema, translated authors and musicial traditions and forms we cannot pronounce.
The darker side of the internet was this - It stripped us of agency. The uncomfortable bedfellow of infinite access was superficial consumption. We consume widely, but rarely deeply.
We have been robbed of our attention, and its harming our ability to be serious and have direction to build our taste.
To fix it, we will (surprise, surprise) turn to another mathematician.
The childlike mathematician who disappeared
In 1933, a young militant anarchist German couple had to flee Berlin. Being Jews, they were being persecuted by Nazi Germany. Worried about the future of their five-year-old son, they entrusted him to the care of a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg.
Six years later, he eventually reunited with his parents. In 1939, his father was arrested and would die in Auschwitz in 1942. He then lived with his mother in refugee camps, who made a living doing housework or breaking her back harvesting crops in fields.
In 1948, this young man, who went by the name of Alexander Grothendieck, was spotted by one of his professors at the University of Montpellier, who wrote him a letter of recommendation.
To Élie Cartan (Yes, the same one who got pranked with Bourbaki!)
At twenty years of age, Grothendieck made his way to Paris and, at some point, enrolled as a Bourbaki member.
There he encountered Laurent Schwartz, who was himself about to receive the Fields Medal (crudely equivalent to the Nobel Prize in Mathematics). Schwartz had Grothendieck read his latest article, which ended with a list of fourteen problems that he had been unable to solve. It’s the kind of list an ambitious student could dig through for a good PhD subject: Choose a problem, spend three years thinking about it, get your advisor to help you find an incomplete solution, and everyone’s happy.
Grothendieck went off to his room and came back a few months later.
He had solved all fourteen problems.
Grothendieck went from mathematical obscurity to being at the apex of mathematics, so much so that his 1966 Fields Medal was a footnote in his life. He and his students reconstructed algebraic geometry from the ground up, and their work still forms the basis for a large part of mathematical research.
And in 1970, at the age of 42, he abandoned his career. In 1991, he retired from the world. Till his death in 2014, he lived as a recluse in the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France. Practising extreme solitude and asceticism, he went as far as trying to live entirely on dandelion soup.6
He left behind a book, Harvests and Sowings, and gave us insights like these
Seeking and finding, that is to say, questioning and listening, is the simplest, the most spontaneous thing in the world, that no one has sole rights to.
It’s a gift we all ‘recieved’ in the cradle
If we see ourselves as someone who seeks and finds, as someone who questions and listens, we could call ourselves researchers of our taste. And to that end, Grothendieck has more to offer
The quality of the inventivness and the imagination of a researcher comes from the quality of his attention, listening to the voice of things.
We need to reclaim our attention. We need to find a way to become a seeker, for our taste depends on it. Taste is a huge part of our personality, it defines what we do when no one is looking. It’s an intimate relationship with yourself.
A relationship, which another recluse from southern France, another lover of Sunflowers, understood deeply.
The most well-known destitute in the art world
On his deathbed, Werner Heisenberg (a pioneer of quantum mechanics) is reported to have (apocryphally) said
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”
We’ve all felt turbulence. Physically, on aeroplanes, which is always faithfully accompanied by the captain mumbling something with the word ‘seatbelt’ thrown in.
Heisenberg was not joking about turbulence. It is one of the least understood physical phenomena. The mathematics of it, known through the Navier-Stokes equation, is devilishly hard to solve (carries a $1 million prize if solved). So, engineers and scientists usually come up with simplified theoretical models or resort to numerical simulations when they want to predict how air or water flows.
This approach has its limits: modelling turbulence bogs down even supercomputers. Imagine trying to model the turbulence of the ocean in numbers.
One of the foundations of the modern theory of turbulence was laid by the Soviet scientist Andrei Kolmogorov in the 1940s.
He identified how energy moves through water or air: Large swirls or “eddies” break into smaller eddies predictably. This type of movement, called turbulent flow, can be seen in “moving water, ocean currents, blood flow, billowing storm clouds and plumes of smoke”
But 13 years before Kolmogorov was born, the art world’s most well-known destitute had stumbled upon something. Three of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings exhibited something peculiar.
The swirling skies of The Starry Night, painted in 1889, Road with Cypress and Star (1890) and Wheat Field with Crows (1890) had this property. These were one of Van Gogh's last pictures before he shot himself at the age of 37.
In June 2006, Physicist Jose Luis Aragon of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Queretaro and his co-workers found that Van Gogh’s works have a pattern of light and dark that closely follows the deep mathematical structure of turbulent flow, as postulated by Kolmogorov.
The team measured the swirls and brushstrokes in The Starry Night and used van Gogh’s color choices to estimate the sky’s movement. They found that 14 of the swirling shapes in the painting align with Kolmogorov’s theory. He was able to successfully capture the sky’s turbulence because he was a talented artist and a meticulous observer of nature.
The researchers said
“The Starry Night reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena. Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”7
Vincent Van Gogh, without the formal tools of science and mathematics, relied on his attention to build his intuition. What the mind did not understand, the body comprehended and reproduced on canvas.
So here is a summary of how taste is created
Culturally
Recursion
Conditionality
Individually
Directionality
Attention
Now that we have the foundations of taste, how do we go about building it?
For that, we return to Buddhism, the ideas of ‘With and Against the Grain’.
The simple way to cultivate great taste
Choose Friction.
Modern culture flows through algorithms. By choosing to spend time on social media, we allow algorithms to dictate our taste. We feel like we have seen everything, but felt nothing. By reducing the friction at each step, by democratising access to everything, we end up consuming things we have no interest in. We trade off the need to sound knowledgeable in a dinner party conversation with our need to have a great internal conversation.
That is going ‘With the Grain’, which leads to deep dissatisfaction in the long run.
We need to go ‘Against the Grain’.
Take the effort to invest your time in reading books. Watch the entire filmography of your favourite director. Spend hours looking at your favourite art. Lose track of time listening to your preferred genre of music. Let them be as obscure, irreverent or as mainstream as you’d like. Let it swallow your leisure time.
Taste cannot be rushed. It needs time. It is not a destination. It is a love song you write, compose and sing for yourself.
Don’t worry about the Canon
If you don’t know what the Canon is, you are blessed. Because the idea that to explore, appreciate and love a subject, you need to necessarily read a few select books is problematic. It reeks of a strong sense of elitism and gatekeeping. Also, when was the last time the ‘Canon’ was updated? Who updates it, and who decides? Storytelling, across mediums, from the East, from Turkey to Korea, has taken over the world, created some of the most influential and moving pieces of art in modern times, but it would never be considered as ‘Canon’. It is inherently ignorant about the rest of the world.
The very idea of canonical texts is rooted in the Western Enlightenment project, which centres itself as the purveyor of culture. It assumes that other civilisations and cultures have not developed their knowledge systems or forms of art.
This is not to say don’t read the canon. If those books interest you, by all means, you should read them. But the idea that taste is only cultivated by reading a few hundred books or watching certain films is a disingenuous one.
Create
Take it a step ahead and move from consumption to creation.
Why?
Because if one were to look at the universe of creators, they are all deep appreciators. You can, of course, be an appreciator without being a creator. But you will always be an appreciator if you are a creator.
Why?
Because as you go deep into the process of creation, you need to necessarily deal with the tougher aspects of art - its logical studs - the method, tools and techniques. But the most rewarding aspect will be around intuition. Creation builds your intuition in ways that consumption cannot understand.
So write, sketch, paint, compose, shoot. Bring to life a story you want to tell, create something with your hands, or birth a sound you want the world to listen to. Because if you have listened to the audio all along (remember, I asked you to start playing it at the beginning), it was the taste of the musician David Macdonald, who created a piano piece from the Fibonacci sequence by assigning numbers to the E major scale.
If we are to cultivate our taste, we need to give it time, devotion and the care it deserves. We need to ask ourselves the areas we want to build our taste in, and we need to carve out time and mental space for it. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert said it best
Be boring, orderly and bourgeois in your life, so that you maybe violent and original in your work.
Thank you for reading this far. I am grateful that you gave me 30 minutes of your time. I hope some part of this made you feel heard or helped you feel, think and live better.
I have one last thing to say. I, along with a friend, run The 6% Club, a content creation program designed for people with full-time jobs. We help you launch your newsletter, podcast or YouTube channel in 45 days. We neither promise virality nor algorithm hacking, but a sustainable, enjoyable way to build a creative outlet for yourself. We have helped 150+ people so far and could help you too.
For a detailed understanding of Nicolas Bourbaki, read Bourbaki's Art of Memory by Liliane Beaulieu
(Probably) The first place Scenius was documented was in Kevin Kelly’s blog, who is the former editor of Wired magazine. You can access the piece here: Scenius or Communal Genius
This profile of George Pólya has been sourced from the piece, Tormented by an Urn
The story of David Smith has been sourced from Quanta Magazine, Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile
The story of Alexander Grothendieck has been sourced from David Bessis’s brilliant book, Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity
The reporting is sourced from Smithsonian Magazine, ‘The Starry Night’ Accurately Depicts a Scientific Theory That Wasn’t Described Until Years After van Gogh’s Death
This was a delight to read, the writing, the research, the artwork, the incorporation of music. In a world where everything is supposed to be fast this really helped me slow down. And it has inspired me to get into deep reading once again. Thanks a lot, looking forward to your next articles !
Wonderful , we'll researched, write up. Still trying to wrap my head around about how you could connect two distant dots Mathematics and taste. Looking forward for more such articles.
Thanks a lot