If you ask a high school student to describe mathematics, you might hear many different answers: boring, difficult, easy, useful. But if you ask a leading mathematician, you may hear something surprising: beautiful.

Bertrand Russell described mathematics as possessing “supreme beauty.” Roger Penrose used those same words when referring to general relativity. Einstein called mathematics “the poetry of logical ideas.” Leonhard Euler also produced an equation that is often regarded as the most beautiful in mathematics—an equation Keith Devlin described as a “Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love.”

Huh?

Math is beautiful? There is something poetic about it? Equations can capture the essence of love? What is going on here? Are these great mathematical minds on to something—or simply on something?

I would suggest that the reason these thinkers reach for the language of aesthetics to describe mathematical formulas is that they are encountering truths eternally grounded in a beautiful God. There is something about these formulas that prevents them from being merely cold or austere descriptions. They can also be experienced as beautiful and poetic.

Mathematics, it seems to me, offers a particularly distinctive window into God’s beauty. Everywhere else we look, we encounter things that were created, contingent, and changeable. If you study biology, geology, or chemistry, you are studying realities that began to exist. But when you reflect on the truth of a mathematical theorem, when did that theorem become true?

It was certainly discovered at a particular point in history. But when did it become true?

It seems to me that mathematical truths, although still dependent on God, exist eternally as expressions of his nature. Therefore, whether they realize it or not, mathematicians who describe their subject in aesthetic terms may be describing more than the beauty of something God made. They may be glimpsing the eternal beauty of who God is.