Is Math Art? Werner Herzog Says Yes | Artnet News

Few are the nights where you’d find thousands of people descending on the Brooklyn Public Library, but March 14 was one such evening. The occasion? Pi Day, an annual observance cherished by lovers of mathematics (it’s also Einstein’s birthday), which the library marked with an overnight festival celebrating all things math—and beyond. 

Lest you think mathematics is only concerned with the numerical, statistical, or trigonometrical, “Night in the Library: The Philosophy of Mathematics” aimed to reveal how it undergirds fields from architecture and poetry to technology and art. The evening hosted tap dancing classes and textile workshops, talks by novelist Michael Cunningham on mysticism and by artist Molly Crabapple on generative A.I., and concerts by Marcus G. Miller and Lőrinc Barabás, son of painter Márton Barabás. 

But making the best case for math’s omnipresence was Werner Herzog, who kicked off the evening with a keynote titled “Mathematics and the Sublime.” The German filmmaker’s 30-minute talk spanned geometry, data visualizations, the golden ratio, and even numerology—“the black sheep of mathematics,” he half-joked.

“Beyond all of this, I do believe mathematics is a new form of art,” he emphasized. “It is loaded with meaning. It’s not just an aesthetic or a form of abstract painting. It’s loaded with poetry.”

For a man who has long worked in a visual medium—“with images, with inner landscapes”—his approach to math has been about visualization, he said. He brought up crystallography and meteorology, as well as the mysteries of the Ulam spiral, a visual pattern revealed when prime numbers are plotted on a spiral grid of integers. “I love to watch fractals,” he added. 

These aesthetics of mathematics, Herzog said, can even touch the sublime. He made clear his love for Euler’s Identity—math’s most beautiful equation which links five fundamental constants—that borders on rapture. “I’m stunned by its simplicity, really,” he said. “Sometimes when I look deeper into it, I get the feeling that I want to cry.”

In ways, Herzog was alluding to his long-held theory of “ecstatic truth,” which proposes that there is a deeper, more profound reality to be found beyond mere facts. As examples, he has pointed to the deeply Romantic (and unlikely) landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Michelangelo’s Pieta, in which Christ appears as a 30-year-old man and the Virgin a teenager.

In his own work, Herzog has sought out his own ecstatic meaning, beyond plain documentary. Case in point: the “mutant albino crocodiles” in 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, creatures that prompt one of Herzog’s most surreal voiceovers—​​”Are we today the crocodiles who look back into the abyss of time when we see the paintings of Chauvet cave?”

And for a maker of films, time naturally came up in his address to the library. “Truth is the daughter of time,” he quoted Leonardo da Vinci. 

But time, too, is just a construct, “another framework for organizing our experiences,” he said. He brought up his friendship with Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who spent 30 years on a tiny island in the Philippines fighting WWII, long after it was over (Herzog dramatized his one-man war in the 2022 novel The Twilight World). “In concordance with Onoda,” he said, “we are the ghost writers of our reality of time.”

Before taking the stage, Herzog told me about his slight worry that his keynote would stretch past its allotted 20 minutes. Most of it was unscripted, with only his wristwatch on the podium to keep him in check. It didn’t work out entirely. Near the end, he reads a passage from Virgil’s Georgics about bees—“Some say the bees have drunk from the light of heaven,” it goes, “and have a share in the divine intelligence”—before stopping himself.

“I would like to read much more,” he said, “but I am over time.”