A virtual three-dimensional model of Las Meninas is discussed. The model suggests that Diego Velázquez used a large mirror to create his masterpiece.

ABSTRACT The authors present their studies in composing elementary wavefunctions of a hydrogen-like atom and identify several relationships between physical phenomena and musical composition that helped guide the process. The hydrogen-like atom accurately captures some of the fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena of nature and supplies the composer with a set of well-defined mathematical constraints that can create a wide variety of complex spatiotemporal patterns. The authors explore the visual appearance of time-dependent combinations of two and three eigenfunctions of an electron with spin in a hydrogen-like atom, highlighting the resulting symmetries and symmetry changes.

ABSTRACT Brunelleschi's lost panel painting of the Florence Baptistery, created in the early 15th century, is frequently cited as the first work to accurately use perspective. The system he used is unknown, and the only information about the painting mentions a demonstration by which the painting was viewed through a hole in the panel as a reflected image in a mirror. The author argues here that the image was created in a camera obscura using the panel and a mirror in the same relationship as used in the demonstration. The author also proposes that the process revealed perspective's basic “rule”: Vanishing points for parallel, horizontal lines exist at the eye level.

ABSTRACT Recent advances in computer vision and image processing have enabled basic automatic analysis of visual art. The author uses computer analysis to extract thousands of low-level numerical image content descriptors from digitized paintings, which are then used to compare objective levels of similarity between the artistic styles of different painters. The analysis reveals that Vincent Van Gogh's and Jackson Pollock's artistic styles are far more similar to each other in terms of low-level image features than Pollock's work is to that of other painters'. This report also proposes that this methodology is useful in quantifying similarities between painters or artistic styles based on large sets of numerical image content descriptors and for detecting influential links not easily detected by the unaided eye.

The authors discuss artwork created by assigning a binary string code with length 11 to each of 2 11 = 2,048 planar regions formed intersection of 11 rotations of a single simple closed curve over 360/11 degrees. The goal of this process is to create the maximum number of connected regions, exactly one for each of the 2,048 different binary strings with length 11. The difficulty in this process lies in finding a suitable curve. The authors briefly describe the methods of finding these complicated curves and show how colors can be assigned to regions representing orbits of shifts of binary strings, thus creating unusual images.

How must n non-overlapping equal circles be packed in a given circle so that the diameter of the circles will be as large as possible? This paper presents an account of this problem and its putative solutions and related configurations in lotus receptacles, classical Japanese mathematics ( wasan ) and traditional Japanese design. Particular emphasis is placed on the connection between the conjectural solutions of this discrete geometrical problem and the fruit arrangements in the receptacles of lotuses, because in most cases the actual fruit arrangements are identical to the mathematical solutions. As the lotus is an important symbol in Buddhism and lotus decorations are quite common in Japanese Buddhist art, packings of circles in a circle have been represented in Japanese art for centuries.

Between 1943 and 1952, Jackson Pollock created patterns by dripping paint onto horizontal canvases. In 1999 the authors identified the patterns as fractal. Ending 50 years of debate over the content of his paintings, the results raised the more general question of how a human being could create fractals. The authors, by analyzing film that recorded the evolution of Pollock's patterns as a function of time, show that the fractals resulted from a systematic construction process involving multiple layers of painted patterns. These results are interpreted within the context of recent visual perception studies of fractal patterns.