Mathematical structures and sense of beauty

Abstract

The recognition of beauty arises from various mental operations, spontaneous or induced, passively accepted or pressingly imposed. The perception of beauty under the subjective aesthetical sensibility can be analyzed, and at least partially justified, with different approaches: neuro-psychological or evolutionary, socio-cultural and mathematical formalizing. These approaches individualize many factors in the determinations of the concept of beautiful, consequential to ancestral needs and social conventions, but also to specific mathematical characteristics. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.