Bobby, what's the French for maths?

There ought to be a word for that moment when, as you’re reclined in blissful peace an arm’s reach from a trashy novel and an iced drink with the Mediterranean sun beating on your overworked, pasty body, you realize that you haven’t got any material for Felix next week. My best attempt has four letters and begins with ‘f’, but I’m sure the Germans must have got a better compound word for it.

Irrespective of whether they do or don’t, it’s the French who’ve spared my first week blushes. The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain plays host later this month to an exhibition entitled, deep breath, wait for it… Mathematics. Whilst I’m sure you all view Felix Arts as a vehicle for escape from an Imperial routine so saturated with scientific ideas it would test even Brian Cox’s enthusiasm, stick with me a paragraph or two more.

Enigmatically subtitled ‘a beautiful elsewhere,’ the project has paired up renowned mathematicians with a handful of the gallery’s past collaborators and set the latter the slightly hackneyed challenge of representing the abstraction of maths through art. Cue the likes of Patti Smith and David Lynch in the blue corner, Michael Atiyah and Alain Connes in the other, together trying to assemble a jigsaw with pieces from two completely different sets.

Michael Atiyah might be convinced to represent punk rock through topological K-theory

Regrettably the Felix budget didn’t stretch to the pair of Eurostar tickets, let alone the time machine, I would’ve needed to see the exhibition that opens in Paris in three weeks myself. However after close inspection of the press files from my Hammersmith bedsit, I get the sense I could have a not too dissimilar experience at the interactive kids’ floor at the Science Museum.

David Lynch’s structure housing an audiovisual installation charting the major developments in the history of mathematics (it's shaped like a zero! The ingenuity!) sounds more like a grandiose learning aid than an artistic exploration of mathematical beauty. The curators trumpet their real-time displays of data from the Planck space probe and the LHC at Cern as tangible examples of real, live science, but the mental image it evokes more closely resembles teletext than a window into the beauty of science.

But as the sun lounger beckons me back to the poolside, there are some positives that can be drawn from this year’s first slightly pessimistic preview. Whilst C. P. Snow, who so bemoaned the death of the polymath in the modern age nearly a century ago, still turns in his grave, we can all live in hope that one day rather than Patti Smith being asked to express maths through art, Michael Atiyah might be convinced to represent punk rock through topological K-theory. And until then, I guess the best place to understand the beauty of maths, and science as a whole, is studying at you know where.

Mathématiques, un dépaysement soudain opens at the Fondation Cartier in Paris on October 20.