1 - Choice and Chaos

Summary

Until recently it was thought that the mathematical solution to the formation of nonreplicating patterns that go on to infinity had not been solved before current advances in Western mathematics. But the discovery of such patterns at several Islamic religious sites prompts us to ask why it mattered to the Muslim artisans of that day to solve the mathematics and create such patterns. Just as Western cathedral art represented a cosmological view so, too, we may conjecture that to these Muslim craftsmen the representation of a world that is full of individual elements that relate to one another in unique ways replicates in the visual world what Allah has created for mankind in the world of social relations. By linking the art form and the mathematics to this broader social vision, we may be able to understand why the masters of that age chose to represent on the walls of their religious structures this particular cosmological pattern.