The Mathematics of Beauty

By Marc Porter Zasada

Here in L.A., everyone thinks they understand the mathematics of beauty. You
know, Clothes. Faces. Legs. Our eyes expertly rove an afternoon mall or a
midnight bar, evaluating the smooth, the tight...or at least, the fashionable.

Tonight I find myself standing in line outside a dance club just off Hollywood
Boulevard. It’s about 11:30, and the line is composed mostly of women 22 to 26,
all trying hard to look beautiful. Strangely, they have each decided to wear the
same tiny black dress, riding high above the hip, along with loose hair,
dangerously high heels, and dark eye makeup.

All the women are pretty...I mean, they aren’t getting in if they’re not pretty...but
tonight their efforts seem, well, too obvious to be called “beauty.” And for a
moment, I consider getting the attention of everyone in line so I can explain the
aesthetic theories of leading Swiss mathematician, Jürgen Schmidhuber.

I mean, what better way to kill the time?

“What is beauty,” asks this thinker. Certainly it implies regularity and

predictability. Even Darwin observed that if you merge a lot of human faces
together photographically, so that you get an average of all faces, the result
seems...pretty. It’s the call of the herd, and I see that surely, in their attempt to look

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exactly alike—not to mention sexually available—the women in line have
accomplished this minimum task.

But Schmidhuber says that true beauty requires an additional element he

mathematically defines as “interestingness.”* “Interestingness” means a set of data
which does not immediately explain itself, but which is nevertheless data we think
we could compress into a clearer and hence more beautiful statement if only we
stared long enough: you know, the way we stare at fine art, trying to figure it out.
His algorithm quantifies the way the eye makes a number of “saccades,” that is,
rapid motions across an object—collecting info for a fresh understanding of the
world.

And here I pause to look at a giggling woman adjusting her spaghetti straps, and I
think...no.

According to Schmidhuber’s algorithm, the interestingness of data D to Observer

O over time equals the potential compression of new data multiplied by beauty,
divided by the change in time. In other words, “A beautiful thing is
interesting...only as long as the algorithmic regularity that makes it simple has not
yet been fully assimilated by the adaptive observer.”*

When you look at a truly beautiful woman, you can understand how this process
might never cease. Consider, like, Cate Blanchett. Your eye makes its many
saccades, but your perception is a hyperbolic curve which approaches, but never
quite reaches an asymptotic value. Something’s there you can never quite grasp.

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And surely, the same is true of mere mortals. I mean, relationships often end when
one person believes they have grasped the totality of the other person; when they
decide that person, no matter how symmetrically arranged, can be too easily
paraphrased.

Sometimes it happens in one night.

Just now, for example, a nearby couple begins to argue. Because she’s so tall, she
looks especially absurd in her tiny black dress. He wears worn jeans with shirt-tails
hanging out. Her clothing says, “I am easy to understand.” His says, “I am
unconcerned.”

Aloud, the woman says, “Why should I do that?”

Aloud, the man replies, “Because you’re not the only woman on the streets
tonight.”

At which, of course, she storms off as fast as anyone wearing stiletto heels can
storm. Which is not, actually, very fast.

Me, I laugh and I turn to look with new appreciation at my...wife, who has, yes,
been standing next to me in line this whole time. She is no doubt unaware that I
have been looking at all these other women; and once again, I see in her face the
many complex data points of a beauty I know I will never fully explore. An
algorithm kicks in, and I say, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Copyright © 2009 Marc Porter Zasada. All rights reserved.

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*Schmidhuber. Simple Algorithmic Theory of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention,
Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes. Journal of SICE, 48(1):21-32, 2009. PDF.

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