Fernando thinks that when maths is deep, it should be simple and able to be explained by hand gestures. By embodying ideas, we’re able to more clearly think about their cultural implications. 

 

The most poetic way to grasp maths as a way of thinking is to move away from ideas of calculation and embrace a kind of gestural understanding. Like the motto of Mary in Metropolis by Fritz Lang — "the mediator between the brain and the hands must be the heart ” — gestures allow the body itself to express the abstract sense of mathematical thought, through a cordial (heartfelt), harmonious coupling between intuition and demonstration, a back and forth between matter and spirit. Somehow real hands can caress ideal concepts. 

 

This session is a shortened version of a three-month long seminar Fernando held in Bogotá. It will present a more intuitive, tactile way of understanding the mathematical ideas he uses to think about culture, ethics and art, concepts like incompleteness, abduction, structure and its absence; folding and unfolding, determination and chaos; a closing towards the positive and opening towards the negative; tension, impossibility, continuity and breaks.