The Hard Math of Beauty: Gerard Manley Hopkins and "Spectral Numbers"

This article examines number-space synesthesia (NSS), a phenomenon first identified by Francis Galton in 1880. Experienced by a small percentage of the population, NSS involves the capacity to visualize numerals in highly personalized spatial formations. The article argues that the Victorian interest in NSS is tied to the larger nineteenth-century interest in non-Euclidean geometry. Analyzing the contributions of the priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to his father's book The Cardinal Numbers (1887), in which the younger Hopkins describes his own experience of NSS, the article demonstrates that NSS operates in a similar way to non-Euclidean geometry by removing numbers from the realm of practical use and rendering them aesthetic objects. In the hands of Hopkins, numbers become the raw material for artistic creation.