Adapted from a story I posted to my Instagram in November 2025.

Researchers gathered a group of mathematicians and showed them 60 equations. It turned out that the same regions of the brain that light up when we admire a beautiful painting or a piece of music also lit up when the mathematicians looked at a beautiful equation.

In other words, beauty doesn’t reside only in the things we conventionally call art.

The funny part is that when they ran the same experiment on ordinary people rather than mathematicians, the results showed that people judged an equation’s beauty by its form alone, regardless of whether they understood it.

For the record, the equation the mathematicians chose as the most beautiful was, unsurprisingly, Euler’s identity.

\[e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0\]

And the ugliest was Ramanujan’s infinite series formula.

\[\frac{1}{\pi} = \frac{2\sqrt{2}}{9801} \sum_{k=0}^{\infty} \frac{(4k)!\,(1103 + 26390k)}{(k!)^4\, 396^{4k}}\]

Study: The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates (Zeki et al., 2014)