The universality of the symmetry concept

Abstract

The notion of symmetry brings together beauty and usefulness, science and economy, mathematics and music, architecture and human relations, and much more, as has been shown recently with many examples (Hargittai 1986, 1989; Hargittai and Hargittai 1995, 1996). There is a lot of symmetry, for example, in Béla Bartúk’s music. It is not known, however, whether he consciously applied symmetry or was simply led intuitively to the golden ratio so often present in his music. Bartùk himself always refused to discuss the technicalities of his composing and stated merely “We create after Nature.” Another unanswerable question is how these symmetries contribute to the appeal of Bartok’s music, and how much of this appeal originates from our innate sensitivity to symmetry. This question might be equally asked of symmetries in architectural composition.