Celestial Tapestry

Celestial Tapestry places mathematics within a vibrant cultural and historical context, highlighting links to the visual arts and design, and broader areas of artistic creativity. Threads are woven together telling of surprising influences that have passed between the arts and mathematics. The story involves many intriguing characters: Gaston Julia, who laid the foundations for fractals and computer art while recovering in hospital after suffering serious injury in the First World War; Charles Howard, Hinton who was imprisoned for bigamy but whose books had a huge influence on twentieth-century art; Michael Scott, the Scottish necromancer who was the dedicatee of Fibonacci’s Book of Calculation, the most important medieval book of mathematics; Richard of Wallingford, the pioneer clockmaker who suffered from leprosy and who never recovered from a lightning strike on his bedchamber; Alicia Stott Boole, the Victorian housewife who amazed mathematicians with her intuition for higher-dimensional space. The book includes more than 200 colour illustrations, puzzles to engage the reader, and many remarkable tales: the secret message in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors; the link between Viking runes, a Milanese banking dynasty, and modern sculpture; the connection between astrology, religion, and the Apocalypse; binary numbers and the I Ching. It also explains topics on the school mathematics curriculum: algorithms; arithmetic progressions; combinations and permutations; number sequences; the axiomatic method; geometrical proof; tessellations and polyhedra, as well as many essential topics for arts and humanities students: single-point perspective; fractals; computer art; the golden section; the higher-dimensional inspiration behind modern art.