An Impact of Creativity and Ingenuity on Liberal Arts with Mathematics

Mathematics and Liberal Arts are related in a variety of ways. Mathematics has itself been described as an art motivated by beauty. Mathematics can be discerned in arts such as music, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, and textiles. This article focuses, however, on mathematics in the Liberal Arts approaches to the Visual Arts in practical implementation or execution. To understand the change that is now underway, it is important to recognize that what are commonly regarded as the liberal arts today are not outside of history. They originated in the Renaissance and underwent prolonged development that culminated in the nineteenth century as a vision of an encyclopaedic education of beaux arts, belles’ letters, history, various natural sciences and mathematics, philosophy, and the fledgling social sciences. This circle of learning was divided into particular subject matters, each with a proper method or set of methods suitable to its exploration. At their peak as liberal arts, these subject matters provided an integrated understanding of human experience and the array of available knowledge. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, existing subjects were explored with progressively more refined methods, and new subjects were added to accord with advances in knowledge.