Into the magical world of color theory

Even the best and brightest get things wrong sometimes (look no further than today’s Correction section😉).

And according to a paper recently published in peer-reviewed journal PNAS, that’s exactly what’s happened in the world of color theory for the past 100+ years. Meaning legends in math and physics – and subsequently, the whole scientific community – have been wrong about how humans perceive color for more than a century.

🎨👀 A deeper dive… The team that performed the study didn’t set out to upend anything. “Our original idea was to develop algorithms to automatically improve colour maps for data visualization, to make them easier to understand and interpret,” Roxana Bujack, the paper’s lead author, said in a release.

• But when they started working, they found some… discrepancies in the existing model. To waaaaaay oversimplify the discovery as well as color theory, it currently overestimates humans’ perception of large color differences (you can read a more technical description here).

🤔 Why should we care?... Expect to see more vibrant computer, phone, and TV screens moving forward, as well as printed materials and textiles.

📝 Bottom line: The uncovered mathematical error underpins a theory introduced by Bernhard Riemann, then furthered by Hermann von Helmholtz and the Nobel-prize winning Erwin Schrödinger (any other paradoxical cat fans out there?). Math and physics majors are nodding their heads rn, but the rest of us can think of these names like Ron Burgundy: kind of a big deal.

And according to Bujack, “proving one of them wrong is pretty much the dream of a scientist.”