In the words of the twentieth-century British mathematician G. H. Hardy, "the human function is to 'discover or observe' mathematics" (1). For centuries, starting from the ancient Greeks, mankind has hunted for beauty and order in arts and in nature. This quest for mathematical beauty has led to the discovery of recurrent mathematical structures, such as the golden ratio, Fibonacci, and Lucas numbers, whose ubiquitous presences have been tantalizing the minds of artists and scientists alike. The captivation for this quest comes with high stakes. In fact, art is the definitive expression of human creativity, and its mathematical understanding would deliver us the keys for decoding human culture and its evolution (2). However, it was not until fairly recently that the scope and the scale of the human quest for mathematical beauty was radically expanded by the simultaneous confluence of three separate innovations. The mass digitization of large art archives, the surge in computational power, and the development of robust statistical methods to capture hidden patterns in vast amounts of data have made it possible to reveal the---otherwise unnoticeable to the human eye---mathematics concealed in large artistic corpora. Starting from its inception, marked by the foundational work by Birkhoff (3), progress in the broad field of computational aesthetics has reached a scale that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. The recent expansion is not limited to the visual arts (2) but includes music (4), stories (5), language phonology (6), humor in jokes (7), and even equations (8); for a comprehensive review, see ref. 9.

中文翻译：

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人类寻求在艺术中发现数学之美

用 20 世纪英国数学家 GH Hardy 的话来说，“人类的功能是‘发现或观察’数学”（1）。几个世纪以来，从古希腊人开始，人类一直在艺术和自然中寻找美和秩序。这种对数学美的追求导致了反复出现的数学结构的发现，例如黄金分割率、斐波那契数和卢卡斯数，它们无处不在的存在一直在吸引着艺术家和科学家的思想。这项任务的魅力在于高风险。事实上，艺术是人类创造力的明确表达，它的数学理解将为我们提供解码人类文化及其进化的钥匙（2）。然而，直到最近，人类对数学美的追求的范围和规模才因三项独立创新的同时融合而急剧扩大。大型艺术档案的大规模数字化、计算能力的激增，以及在大量数据中捕捉隐藏模式的稳健统计方法的发展，使得揭示---否则人眼无法察觉---数学成为可能隐藏在大型艺术语料库中。从一开始，以 Birkhoff (3) 的基础工作为标志，计算美学这个广阔领域的进步已经达到了十年前无法想象的规模。最近的扩展不仅限于视觉艺术 (2)，还包括音乐 (4)、故事 (5)、语言音系 (6)、笑话中的幽默 (7)、甚至等式（8）；有关全面审查，请参阅参考文献。9.