Picasso, Einstein, Poincaré

In science, mathematics and philosophy, the laws of a clockwork universe established by Sir Isaac Newton in the Baroque age were giving way before the first world war to extraordinary notions – that time and space are one, that light waves curve, that no two observers see exactly the same thing. Picasso and Einstein, [as Arthur I.] Miller has shown [in Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc], were both influenced by the French thinker Henri Poincaré, who published his book La Science et l’Hypothèse in 1902. In it he argued that, far from being universally true, the Euclidian geometry that had defined mathematics since ancient times was only one of many possible systems, its three dimensions nothing like the only ones that could be conceived. But, said Poincaré, Euclid’s is the most “convenient” set of assumptions with which to negotiate life.

From a very interesting article on cubism, “Fragments of the universe”, by Jonathan Jones in Guardian.