The Birthday of William Blake (1757) — Mathematics of Imagination

William Blake, poet and artist, famously wrote: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower’. Though not a mathematician, his work resonates with fractal geometry — self‑similarity across scales. Blake was critical of the cold rationalism of Newton and Locke, but his visions of infinity and order mirror the mathematical sublime. The mathematics of fractals (Mandelbrot set, Julia sets) reveals infinite detail within finite boundaries — a grain of sand containing a world. Art and mathematics both explore the infinite through finite means.