ABSTRACT
Emmer (1993) claimed creativity to be a bridge between art and mathematics exemplified (www. olats.org/colloque/textes/texte7.shtml) in his traveling exhibition The Eye of Horus: Art and Mathematics (Emmer, 1990). A shared language is needed to make bridges between science, art and metaphysics (Thiessen, 1998). Scientific phenomena and concepts need to be possible to isolate for better understanding nature which also is represented in artistic, philosophical and theological settings. Thiessen (1998) boiled the crucial factors of interdisciplinary creativity down to three issues: “a common purpose, a common language, and a shared model” (p. 47). Root-Bernstein (2003) suggests that “innovation is a process of survival of the fittest in which multiple variations of ideas are selected by social, economic, cultural and other factors” (p. 267), and argues that while artists think of possibilities and possible worlds, scientists are often hemmed in by domain limitations and have to work within this world. Mathematics as a discipline is often compared to art especially in its aesthetic component (Brinkmann & Sriraman, 2009), and the intermarriage of the world of art and mathematics is often manifested in the world of architecture and more recently in non-linear art installations involving digital media (Brosz, Carpendale, Samavati, Wang, & Dunning, 2009). The question of how to foster and develop innovators in mathematics and science in general, is by and large unanswered, even though there is an increasing body of developmental literature analyzing eminent samples such as Nobel laureates (Shavinina, 2003). In this chapter we make a case for cultivating visualization, geometric modes of thinking, which are common traits of polymaths (Sriraman, 2009a) with the implication that it can be cultivated in schooling.
