 . . . Summer 1999
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| BEAUTY IS ALSO IN THE SUBSTANCE OF THE BEHELD: CAROL BIER OF THE TEXTILE MUSEUM |
 What makes something beautiful? Sure, the eye of any beholder is important in the determination, but what about the qualities of the object beheld? This is a question that Carol Bier, curator of the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, has gone a long way toward answering as it applies to one source of visual pleasure-so-called Oriental carpets.
Bier delved into fractal geometry and the mathematics of dynamic systems to help us understand the glory of traditional Oriental carpets–the patterns that "tease the mind as they please the eye." What follows is a greatly abbreviated version of her discussion of the mathematics of woven beauty. For a grander delight to the eye and mind, see the Textile Museum/Swarthmore College-Math Forum Website: [MORE] |
"So-called," because, as Bier emphasizes, "No carpet weaver ever sets out to weave an 'Oriental' carpet. In every region where pile carpets are produced by hand (roughly, the sheep-rearing areas of the pre-Colonial world) a young girl, or an old woman, or less often a boy, would set about weaving something called, simply, a carpet in his or her local language. The term Oriental carpet is a Western construct."
Bier, who was the 1999 Norman Freehling Visiting Professor in U-M's