According to the report of China Daily on June 16, in the later works of Impressionist Van Gogh, people can find some swirling patterns, such as Starry Sky and Crow in the Rye. People have always thought that these eddies

It is an artistic expression of Van Gogh, and now physicists from Mexico say that there are complex mathematical and physical formulas hidden behind the vortex.

Accurately reflect the mathematical formula

According to reports, Jose Aragon, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, found through research that the swirls of different shades in Van Gogh's paintings actually coincide with the mathematical formula used by scientists to describe turbulence half a century later.

Turbulence was once called "the last difficult problem in classical physics". Scientists have been trying to describe turbulence with accurate mathematical models, but so far no one has been able to completely solve it. In the 1940s, Andrei Andrey Kolmogorov, a mathematician in the former Soviet Union, put forward the formula of "Andrei Andrey Kolmogorov microscale". With the help of this formula, physicists can predict the relationship between any two points in the fluid in speed and direction.

The whirlpools in Van Gogh's paintings, such as Starry Sky, Cuibai Road under the Star and Crow in the Rye, embody this formula. Aragon said: "Van Gogh's Starry Sky and other passionate works were completed in a state of extreme mental instability, which captured the essence of turmoil."

When you are calm, you lose your ability.

At the time of writing Starry Sky, Van Gogh was being treated in a mental hospital in Saint-Remy, southern France. At that time, he had fallen into a state of inner madness caused by epilepsy, sometimes awake and sometimes confused. Aragon believed that Van Gogh's hallucinations gave him insight into the principle of vortex. Van Gogh once described the hallucinations caused by illness as "inner storms", while his doctors called them "strong delusions of vision and hearing".

Once Van Gogh regained calm, he lost the ability to describe the turmoil. At the end of 1888, he quarreled with his friend and cut off one of his ears. During his stay in hospital, he became very calm because of taking sedatives. The works he created during this period can't find the shadow of whirlpool.

Steven schacter, a professor of neurology at Harvard University, said that Van Gogh was probably affected by epilepsy. "Someone will have a new and abnormal consciousness when he is ill, and his feelings and cognition will become abnormal."

Although Van Gogh is not the only painter who has seen whirlpools in his paintings, such as edvard munch, an expressionist painter, whose masterpiece Scream is also full of whirlpools, Aragon found through research that the whirlpools written by other painters can't accurately reflect the mathematical formula like Van Gogh.