Sea Change: Reason, Revolution, and Creativity

While much has been written about the 19th century as a watershed period of curiosity, discovery, and reform, specific comparisons among the fine arts and mathematics have rarely been investigated. Sea Change brings to light connections and individual contributions that eventually led to new paradigms of abstraction, later identified as indicators of modernism. For instance, the mathematician Carl Gauss anticipated the aesthetic herald of "art for art's sake" by nearly one hundred years when he declared that "there are sciences whose study is not encouraged by the prospect of benefits to physical existence," but, rather, by "a pure, disinterested study in joy." Through examples from architecture, painting, geometry, and literature, presented as a network of layered imagery and text, the reader will come to realize that the term "sea change" refers not only to cultural revolutions, but also to shifting viewpoints about the supposed constancy of Nature, as seen in the work of formerly unacknowledged partners from the arts and sciences.