turbulence math – A new video lesson ties Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 “Starry Night” to the physics of turbulence, arguing that the painting’s swirling night sky captures movement and light with a precision that mirrors how researchers explain chaotic flow—something that creators p
On a New York wall where “Starry Night” hangs in the MoMA, the sky still looks like it’s alive—rolling, churning, refusing to sit still.
The museum has long described what viewers feel when they stand close enough: it’s a “symbolic landscape full of movement. energy. and light.” There’s a built-in contrast. too—the quiet village below set against “the swirling energy of the sky.” And it’s not just the subject matter. The MoMA points to van Gogh’s impasto technique. the thick application of paint. saying it creates a “rhythmic effect” so that the painting “seems to constantly move in its frame.”.
Now, a new lesson is trying to explain why that sense of motion isn’t only an artistic trick. The video—“The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. ” embedded from a TED-Ed lesson—looks at how van Gogh. in 1889. managed to depict movement. fluidity. and light in a way that “no artist had ever quite done it before.”.
Created by math artist and teacher Natalya St. Clair and animator Avi Ofer, the lesson homes in on turbulence, the elusive phenomenon tied to chaotic, swirling flow. It argues that in “Starry Night. ” van Gogh depicted turbulence with a level of “sophistication and accuracy” that rivals the way physicists and mathematicians have explained turbulence in their own scientific papers.
The story the video tells also places the work in a human timeline. It connects the achievement to “the turbulent last years of van Gogh’s life,” suggesting that the physics of chaos and the lived experience of chaos arrived at the canvas together—perhaps not by design, but by coincidence.
This isn’t the first time the idea has circulated in this form. A note with the lesson points out that an earlier version of the post appeared on Open Culture in 2014.
For viewers, the real change isn’t that the painting suddenly becomes something else. It’s that the feeling the MoMA describes—an image that seems to keep moving—gets a new kind of companion: the mathematics of turbulence, folded into the swirl.
Van Gogh Starry Night MoMA TED-Ed turbulence math impasto technique art and science Nataliya St. Clair Avi Ofer