Vincent van Gogh's masterpiece "The Starry Night" was painted in 1889. PHOTO
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‘The Starry Night’ and turbulence theories The atmospheric motion of the painted sky cannot be directly measured, so Huang and his colleagues precisely measured the brushstrokes and compared the size of the brushstrokes to the mathematical scales expected from turbulence theories. To gauge physical movement, they used the relative brightness or luminance of the varying paint colors.
The researchers studied the 14 whirls or eddies in van Gogh's celebrated painting. PHOTO
Yinxiang Ma
They discovered that the sizes of the 14 whirls or eddies in “The Starry Night,” and their relative distance and intensity, follow a physical law that governs fluid dynamics known as Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence. In the 1940s, Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov described a mathematical relationship between the fluctuations in a flow’s speed and the rate at which its energy dissipates.
The researchers studied the brushstrokes made by van Gogh, who painted the work after admitting himself to an asylum in southern France. PHOTO
Yinxiang Ma
On display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “The Starry Night” is an enormously popular work of art that has been recreated in Lego bricks, drones and dominoes. Huang said that scientists had long struggled to describe turbulent flow in fluid dynamics in a way that would allow them to predict the phenomenon and that a complete explanation remains a prevailing mystery of physics.
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https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/science/starry-night-van-gogh-hidden-math/index.html
