Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture

Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. Victorian mathematicians reconceived mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice–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 convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: mathematicians wrote fables describing non-Euclidean spaces, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality itself as consisting of shapely and beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, 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. Algebraic Art shows that artworks we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian culture and continues to shape our conceptions of aesthetic form.