Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity

An Oxford mathematician, playwright, and musician reveals how creative people can harness the profound and productive relationship between mathematics and the arts

When Shakespeare has the Three Witches cast Macbeth's lot, he uses something very weird to do it: not simply “eye of newt and toe of frog,” but the number seven. And when Hamlet claims, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Shakespeare reaches for eleven. For Shakespeare, prime numbers were magical. And he is not alone.

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