Renaissance Men:
Mary Washington Professor Bülent Atalay Meets Leonardo da Vinci
By Gregory McNamee
Leonardo da Vinci was a bundle of contradictions: a pacifist who earned
much of his living as a military engineer; a religious skeptic whose
“Last Supper” is one of the most spiritually sublime works
in the history of art; and a self-taught scientist who painted from
time to time, leaving behind only a dozen-odd completed works at his
death, and yet is one of the most revered artists in the world canon.
The artist was interested in just about everything, and, though a born procrastinator, he finished a prodigious amount of work in his lifetime. He even was well-liked by his contemporaries – with the notable exception of Michelangelo.
Contradictions aside, nearly 500 years after his death, Leonardo da Vinci still provides endless fascination for us 21st-century types: The “Mona Lisa” remains a must-see for any visitor to Paris, “Vitruvian Man” regularly figures in advertisements for such things as cars and computers, and books about Leonardo – including, most recently, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code – flow from the presses.
For
Mary Washington physics professor Bülent
Atalay (photo at left), modern society’s ongoing fascination
with Leonardo comes as no surprise. Atalay is the author of Math
and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci. The
book, now in its fifth printing, was published in the spring of 2004
by Smithsonian Books to strong sales and favorable reviews.
Leonardo speaks across the centuries, Atalay said. That’s true at least in part because he worked with universal ideas that are independent of time and place. In other words, a highlander in the remote forests of New Guinea and a financial wizard on Wall Street are just as likely to see beauty and order in the great artist’s works.
“Mona Lisa”, for instance, is not merely a beautiful representation of a famously enigmatic woman. Throughout the painting is a proportion that is pleasing to the human eye and resonates in nature, a proportion so familiar that scientists and artists alike have dubbed it the “golden section,” permutations of which yield a golden rectangle and golden triangle.
Think of the golden section as a kind of mathematical expression of perfection – though mathematicians might not like to use such a value-laden term – and it is easy to understand why it figures so often in classical works of art and architecture, such as the Egyptian pyramids, the Parthenon and the portraits of Rembrandt.
To illustrate, Atalay traces a line from the top of Mona Lisa’s head to the top of her bodice, the ratio of which is the golden rectangle. The golden triangle is there, too, found on her torso, “slightly turned, her right shoulder and her right cheek set back relative to the left shoulder and left cheek, respectively,” according to Atalay.
The golden ratio also turns up, Atalay noted, deep in the structure of human DNA itself. That helps to explain why cultures around the world find expressions of the ratio to be beautiful just about everywhere they turn up – whether in a face, a swirling cloud, a cathedral or a seashell.
Atalay’s delight in such discoveries seems boundless. He has spent much of his professional career – nearly all of it at Mary Washington – working with esoteric theories and ideas that fly above the head of most mortals. One such idea, a perturbation theory for projected states, he said, “is so specialized that perhaps a few dozen people in the world have real interest in it – and that includes my family.” Yet, he is also an avid generalist, a lover of classical music and literature as well as visual art.
Math and the Mona Lisa grew from his many notable accomplishments and interests, as well as from his teaching experience. He has been happily sharing his enthusiasm in Mary Washington classrooms for the last 38 years.
There are practical as well as personal reasons for his interest in the world of ideas beyond the lab. Atalay’s theory is that science students who have no engagement with the arts and the humanities are missing critically important tools for thinking about the world.
Former student Keith Wamsley ’03 said Atalay often spoke of the intersection of art and science, especially in his graduate course, The Character of Physical Law. “Even in his basic course, University Physics, he often connected what we were learning to the history of science and the intellectual atmosphere of the time that produced the discoveries or insights that we were currently studying,” added Wamsley, a Cornell graduate who earned his master’s degree from Mary Washington.
Atalay’s introductory physics class set Justin Conroy ’00 on a different course. “He immediately inspired me to go into physics,” said Conroy, who planned to major in chemistry when he entered Mary Washington as a freshman. “Dr. Atalay talked to me about art, about classical music, literature, and so on, and I found myself as a sophomore starting to listen to Beethoven and Mozart in place of Pink Floyd and the Beatles – although that’s great music too.
“Back when physics classes were in Combs Hall, and Dr. Atalay’s office was right off the main lecture hall, he would play classical music for us while we were taking his exams,” said Conroy, who is completing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the College of William & Mary.
Atalay, a native of Turkey who attended schools in Europe and the United States, recalled having his own interest in the confluence of art and science piqued by a guest lecturer in his 11th-grade classroom.
The teacher illustrated the lecture with his own artwork and introduced the concept of the golden triangle, Atalay said. He also talked about the Fibonacci series, a deceptively simple series of numbers that also played a role in Leonardo’s work.
(The Fibonacci series is a sequence of numbers first published by Leonardo Fibonacci in 1202. The first two numbers in the series are one and one. To obtain each number of the series, you simply add the two numbers that came before it. In other words, each number of the series is the sum of the two numbers preceding it.)
“The teacher was not the most effective speaker, nor a particularly good artist, but the content of his talk was fascinating for me – I had a passion for art, and I had a passion for mathematics,” Atalay said. “And in time, I would develop a passion for physics. Leonardo embodied the same passions, but he came by them all on his own. In examining nature, he somehow developed the skills to frame questions in just the right way – in the manner of a modern scientist.”
A modern scientist, that is, with Bülent Atalay’s unusually rich toolbox at his disposal. Leonardo da Vinci’s very method, rich in scientific and psychological insights, added to the universality of his work. In Math and the Mona Lisa, Atalay wrote that Leonardo’s method blended “careful experimentation, meticulous observation, copious recording of data, and a synthesis in the form of an explanation.”
As testimony to that fruitful approach, we have the 4,000 or so pages of Leonardo’s famed notebooks that have survived, less than a third of his total output. Atalay laments the knowledge that was lost with those missing pages, a mystery worthy of an Umberto Eco novel.
“Had his work in physics, geology, anatomy, optics and astronomy and his designs for machines been available to other scientists,” Atalay said, “we might have reached our present level of scientific and technological sophistication by the late 18th century.”
With Leonardo for inspiration, Atalay takes pains to keep abreast of developments in all the physical sciences. Moreover, the world-traveling scholar pursues other interests, including history, archaeology, art history and painting.
“But only a fool would claim to be an artist while discussing Leonardo,” Atalay said demurely.
Those pursuits turn up often in the pages of Math and the Mona Lisa, which touches on X-ray technology, the evolution of perspective, the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, remote sensing, quantum theory, and an arcane 1940 Indiana legislative resolution that dealt with mathematical values, among other topics great and small.
A model for contemporary scientists, Leonardo personifies what the renowned biologist E. O. Wilson calls “consilience”: the unity of many branches of human knowledge. Leonardo’s wide-ranging interests and, in Atalay’s words, “endless delight for making connections” aside, Leonardo also collaborated with other scientists late in life. With them, he sought to add to his store of knowledge about astronomy, geology and anatomy while at the same time passing on what he knew.
Atalay shares Leonardo’s willingness to cross disciplinary boundaries, something former student Davis Lee ’98 remembers well.
“The single greatest thing I learned from Bülent Atalay was the importance of a total holistic view of things,” said Lee, who went on to earn a Ph.D. in plasma physics from MIT. “Be it art or physics, math, economics, sports, these things are all interrelated; everything is, in fact, interrelated.
“To use an art analogy,” Lee continued, “it’s like looking at a slide of a sculpture. There are many vantage points, and any single view does not do the object justice. You need to walk around the object and look down on it and up at it. The same is true of life, science, math or art. Economics can lead to a symphony, love can spawn a stroke of scientific genius, and art can be mathematical.”
Clearly, Leonardo da Vinci offers an example for the rest of us. And so does Bülent Atalay.
He closes Math and the Mona Lisa with a gentle exhortation
to his readers – students in a classroom that now reaches far
beyond University of Mary Washington – to follow Leonardo’s
model: Keep an open mind, take copious notes, make sketches, experiment
constantly, and seek connections always. “Observe in the manner
of the scientist, savor in the manner of the artist.”
| about the author Gregory McNamee writes frequently for such journals as Kirkus Reviews, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Washington Post Book World and is a contributor and consultant to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A former resident of Northern Virginia, he now lives in Tucson, Ariz. |