“The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh
The famous painting “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh was painted while he was living in a mental hospital. While it’s truly beautiful, many art historians attribute the swirls and the style of painting to his mental state. But in a 2014 TED Talk, a scientist named Natalya St. Clair revealed the hidden genius behind the painting. These swirls are actually a representation of an extremely complicated mathematical concept called “turbulent flow”.
During her speech, St. Clair explains, “In 2004, using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists saw the eddies of a distant cloud of dust and gas around a star, and it reminded them of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night. That motivated scientists to study Van Gogh’s paintings in detail and when they did, they discovered that there is a distinct pattern of turbulent fluid structures hidden in many of Van Gogh’s paintings.”
