Creative Combinatorics

Theory of forms

In connection with his color theory Ostwald was also engaged in the “harmony of forms”. Using the rules he developed Ostwald created ornaments and new forms “according the laws of combinatorics” which were “all beautiful, without any exception”!

• Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Welt der Formen : Entwicklung und Ordnung der gesetzlich schönen Gebilde (Leipzig 1922).
• Wilhelm Ostwald, ‘Warum sind Kristalle schön?’, Hamburger Fremdenblatt 94 (1922) No. 150

Wilhelm Ostwald and De Stijl

In the first volume of the journal De Stijl a review on Ostwald’s colour theory was published. Two years later De Stijl published Ostwalds paper on the “Harmony of colors”, whose German edition had been published in the journal “Innendekoration”.

De Stijl. Edited by Theo van Doesburg. Leiden, 1917-1932. 8 volumes (90 numbers).

• Wilhelm Ostwald, ‘Die Harmonie der Farben’, De Stijl 3 (1920) 7, 60-62

Wilhelm Ostwald

Wilhelm Ostwald, 1853 (Riga, Latvia) – 1932 (Leipzig, Germany) was one of the founders and the organizer of the discipline ‘physical chemistry’ at the end of the 19th century. He worked from 1887 until 1906 as professor in Leipzig, received the 1909 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on catalysis, equilibria and rates of chemical reactions.

Especially after his retirement he developed broad and multifaceted interests as well as wrote numerous publications in philosophy (of nature), history (of science) as well as color theory and the international organization of scholarly work e.g. through promoting an artificial language.

An actual biography: Kim, Mi Gyung (2006). Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932). in: HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry 12 (2006) 1, S. 141-148.

Combinatorics and creativity by Wilhelm Ostwald

“Combinatorics doesn’t replace productive imagination only, but is superior to it!”

So creativity included for Ostwald not only “productive imagination” but also “combinatorics”. From his view ideas and discoveries are often only “a novel combination of existing components”. Newly-discovered facts in scientific research also has to be combined with diverse existing facts to create new insights. His idea on creativity corresponds with modern views concerning an alternative exposure to copyright and intellectual property within the “Creative Commons” licences: “Share, reuse, and remix – legal” (http://creativecommons.org).

Wilhelm Ostwald (1929). Combinatorics and productive imagination (Kombinatorik und schaffende Phantasie. In: Forschen und Nutzen: Wilhelm Ostwald zur wissenschaftlichen Arbeit (pp. 28-30). Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1978.

Starting!

“And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index… The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. But when shall we write books like catalogues?”

This blog accompanies the preparation of my poster with the title “Combinatorics and order as a foundation of creativity, information organisation and art in the work of Wilhelm Ostwald” in the sense of the quote of Walter Benjamin above!

Blogs are containers for notes and something like modern card boxes!

From: Walter Benjamin: Attested Auditor of Books. In: Benjamin, W. (1928), ”One-way street” (Vol. 1, p. 456 and 457), in: Benjamin, W. (2001), Selected writings. 2 vol., Bullock, M. and Jennings, M.W. (eds.). (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).