Mathematics can be related to art in many ways. One can study art mathematically, looking for symmetries or other relations in the construction of a painting or sculpture. Conversely, mathematical algorithms can be used to help create art: fractal systems, for instance, can recreate realistic shapes of plants, mountains and clouds.

 Famously, perspective drawing has a mathematical basis, and is a good example of how different the human brain is from a digital computer. It is trivial for a computer to apply the rules of perspective to project a three-dimensional model world to a two-dimensional drawing, while human artists often have difficulty applying these rules. On the other hand, we effortlessly use our visual system to reconstruct a three-dimensional model of the world around us from the two-dimensional images presented on our retinas. We thereby solve a very difficult (even ill-posed) problem that the best computers still have trouble with.