What is beauty?

I wrote a program, which would calculate a correlation percentage based on the equations found on the Wolfram Research Mathworld website1. It allows the user to look at several pictures and rate them on the 12 criteria listed above. After several pictures, it can then compute the correlation between the measure beautiful and the other terms. This program was then integrated into a webpage so that many people can use it and it can gather a wide range of perception of beauty.

This program is part of this creativity project, so I strongly encourage you2 to visit its website: http://jacob.peargrove.com/beauty (no longer operational)

You will start at an introductory page with some instructions. You can then begin by viewing pictures. You should rate each picture on the 12 attributes defined on the page. You don’t need to spend too much time on a particular picture. When you are ready to view the next picture, you can click the “More” button near the bottom right corner of the page. You can continue rating pictures until you have seen them all (there are currently 23 in the database) or until you don’t want to rate pictures any more, although I suggest rating at least 5. When you are done, click the “View Results” link.

The program will then find the correlation between your answers, as well as the correlation between the combined answers of all users. It will tell you which attributes are related to beauty, and if so, to what degree.

These results help us find two descriptions of beauty, a personalized and individual view, as well as a general view held by many people. These descriptions are mathematical. For example, currently, there is about a 75% correlation between “beautiful” and “peaceful.” This helps us understand that in general, things that are beautiful are things that we find peaceful. Or, in other words, some of the emotions that are caused by beauty, are very similar to some of the emotions that we feel when we observe something peaceful.

I hope this has been an interesting perception of beauty for you. I hope its also helped you be aware to a greater degree what beauty is, by relating the emotions that beauty causes to the emotions caused by other adjectives.

Related posts

1. Intro to History of Creativity
2. Royal Decree?
3. Windmill project
4. No more blog notes?
5. Waterseller

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