Yale Math featured in Scientific American

September 20, 2019

The October Issue of Scientific American reports on a psychological experiment that was conceived and (partially) carried out in the Yale Math Department.  The goal of the experiment was to understand whether people without any mathematical training perceive mathematical arguments as having aesthetic qualities similar to music or paintings. The authors of the study, Samuel Johnson (then Yale Psychology, now University of Bath) and Stefan Steinerberger (Yale Math) did a small scale pre-test within the Yale Math Department (with the help of Miki Havlickova, John Hall and Brett Smith); the full results have been published in Cognition.