When you travel around the world, you can’t help but notice that many cultures have a unique language of abstract visual patterns. These patterns show up on pottery, fabrics, walls and many other surfaces.
Korea, China, Indonesia, Japan, various parts of India, different indigenous nations in the Americas — each has a distinct visual language, with its own mathematical underpinning. There are sometimes connections and influences between the patterns of one culture and another, but each culture’s family of patterns is unique and instantly identifiable.
I wonder whether there is a universal visual language of such patterns. Perhaps some unifying mathematical framework could tie them together, describing each unique cultural variation within the context of a single unifying theory.