WERE IT NOT BEAUTIFUL IT WOULD NOT BE TRUE:

During the summer before my senior year at the University of Michigan, I took Introduction to Theoretical Physics, taught by Professor Otto Laporte. For some odd reason, the class met at 7:00 PM. One night, Laporte walked in, with two martinis under his belt, and announced, "Tonight gentlemen, I'm going to show you something beautiful." He proceeded to elegantly lay out several fundamental theorems about vector spaces. When finished, he stepped back from the blackboard and said, "Isn't that beautiful." One student in the class, the very worst one, asked, "What is so beautiful about that?" Laporte was taken back, and after a moment of silence, asked, "Do the rest of you see that this is beautiful?" We all nodded, and several students replied, "Of course." The professor then turned to the student who was blind to the beauty of vector spaces and told him, "You be quiet. The rest of us see it." Laporte told us in his blunt way that intellectual insight and the apprehension of beauty are not democratic, that poor cultural formation, political and economic ideology, and a habituation to lies and ugliness can cut a person off from truth and beauty.

Strangely, neither Laporte nor any student in his class could give the characteristic marks of beauty. Except for the worst student, we all recognized mathematical beauty without having ever been taught to. In the terminology of ancient philosophy, our souls by nature were attuned to beauty.

Tweet   @brothersjudd