Pioneering digital artist Miguel Chevalier discovered within Islamic art a language similar to his own. His interest in the generative image, ornate designs, virtual cities, and especially algorithmic art has commonalities with the symmetrical geometry seen in Persian rugs, and mosques such as Jama Masjid of Herat in Afghanistan. What both Chevalier’s work with computers and Islamic art’s complex star-and-polygon patterns share is a basis in mathematics. In 2007, Paul J. Steinhardt and Peter J. Lu released research notes into medieval Islamic art, which showed a breakthrough around 1200 had led to an intuitive understanding of complicated mathematics. Writing about this in an essay for Muslim Heritage, Professor Salim…