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  • Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture

    Algebraic Art by Henderson, Andrea K.;

    Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 72.00
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        34 398 Ft (32 760 Ft + 5% VAT)
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    34 398 Ft

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    Availability

    Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
    Not in stock at Prospero.

    Why don't you give exact delivery time?

    Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.

    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP Oxford
    • Date of Publication 12 April 2018

    • ISBN 9780198809982
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages232 pages
    • Size 220x148x19 mm
    • Weight 420 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 28 Illustrations
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    Short description:

    Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. Drawing on literature, art, and photography, it explores how the Victorian mathematical conception of form still resonates today.

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    Long description:

    Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice--as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns.

    Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a 'science' of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wavelike stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll's children's books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.

    exhaustively researched, original in its claims, and compelling in its conclusions.

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    Table of Contents:

    Introduction
    Geometry: Math for Math's Sake: Non-Euclidean Geometry and Aestheticism
    Algebra: Symbolic Logic and the Logic of Symbolism
    Analysis: Magic Mirrors: Formalist Realism in Victorian Photology and Photography
    Analogy: The Physics and Poetics of Analogy
    Invariant Forms: '[T]he bonds of verse' Form as Discipline
    Coda: '[T]o bury Euclid deep in the living flesh'

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