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Kandinsky was an economist before changing careers at age 30 to become a world renowned painter; his art remained highly influenced by math we use in Econ: e.g. Kakutani developed his famous Fixed Point theorem in 1941. A year later, Kandinsky painted Fixed Points. Beautiful, no? https://twitter.com/artistkandinsky/status/1351271413815107589
The one reference that’s out there linking Kandinsky to Math seems to place it earlier (1929) https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2013/bridges2013-473.pdf saying “Fixed Points” is startling because it “evokes graph theory, and the first textbook on graph theory did not appear until 1936!”.
I don’t know about that, Brouwer’s FP theorem was from 1912 and Von Neumann seemed to be active by 1925. Is it possible Kandinsky would have studied FPTs by the time he started painting his Fixed Points in 1929? Perhaps someone in #EconTwitter into history of Econ thought knows
Another fun fact, I found this picture around midnight after spending all day debugging code to try to (unsuccessfully) find a fixed point! Can’t be a coincidence... I’ll get back to it tomorrow with Kandinsky there to inspire my quest to find that bug messing up the FP solver
This also brought back a nice memory from the 1st semester of my PhD of Emmanuel in his office drawing a spiral in the air with his hands making it click in my mind how useful FPTs are in Econ... I bet you Emmanuel knew Kandinsky was an Econ guy — he was that kind of person!
More evidence that Kandinsky catalyzed propagation between disciplines: he was influenced by and influenced musicians of his time, Scriabin in particular; listen to him play a famous Etude from 1910 that pairs particularly well with Kandinsky's art
Scriabin (who contributed to Kandinsky's magazine in 1912 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jun/24/art.art) claimed he suffered from a condition called "synesthesia", propagation between senses, and could "hear" colors when composing music. Judge for yourself (played by Horowitz)
