Islamic Geometric Art: The Mathematics of the Infinite
Islamic geometric art is perhaps the most mathematically sophisticated visual tradition in human history — and its sophistication is inseparable from its theology. In Islam, the depiction of the human figure in sacred contexts is problematic: no human form should compete with the divine. What took its place was geometry — the abstract language of mathematical pattern, understood as the closest available approximation to the infinite, self-replicating order of God's creation. The tile patterns of the Alhambra in Granada, the carved plaster of the Moroccan madrasas, the mosaic domes of Isfahan's Friday Mosque contain, in visual form, the same mathematical structures that Western science discovered analytically centuries later: quasi-crystalline symmetry, non-periodic tiling, the seventeen plane symmetry groups. The artists who made these patterns did not have algebra in the modern sense. They had something that may have been more powerful: an intuitive, practiced, devotional rela...