Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci

by Bülent Atalay

I am a person, I like to think, who lives in both cultures.

“Renaissance man”

Leonardo was the first modern scientist.

De divina proportione.

For Leonardo, the paragon artist-scientist-engineer, the astonishing variety of his interests are like the knots of a magnificent tapestry. Uncovering the internal dynamics of each of these interests and establishing the connections between them were his quest, and systematic experimentation, his method.

Leonardo’s model to seek again the consilience of science and art—painting, architecture, sculpture, music, mathematics, physics, biology, and engineering—

The underlying mathematics and the principles of symmetry are not just useful, they are indispensable.

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed and the first of which is coming. Thus it is with time present. Life, if well spent, is long.

however, that nature’s own inventions were by far the most beautiful (“nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous”) meant that we should begin by trying to emulate nature’s own creations. “If birds can fly, so should humans be able to fly,” he wrote, a belief that fueled his life-long interest in creating machines that could carry man aloft. Some of his mental inventions