Historical Speculations on the Existence of Unicorns, by Bryan Adrian

Do you know the history of the unicorn?  It was/is real.  It is not just a cute one horned horse for little girls.  It was a special creature on earth, more intelligent and powerful than humans, to protect its beloved 'human pet' species, as vulnerable as little girls, against other adversarial mystery predators on earth.

They succeeded protecting humans for millennia.  Unfortunately, a new unknown enemy came to earth's stage and penetrated ancient Minoan cultures and gene pools via Doric Greek culture, ancient Jews, ancient Egyptians, ancient Celtic, and ancient Japanese, and others.  All these refined and advanced cultures were overthrown by this new predatory species that finally vanquished nearly all unicorns too [but not all (-: ]. The "revenant" unicorn is a distinct possibility!

The weakness of the unicorn is in its being so gentle with "maidens" ie. weaker non-warlike species, despite how fierce it could be with powerful adversarial predators.

Finally the unicorns were tricked and deceived by a conniving clan of "maidens" who set up a trap for the unicorn species, as depicted in the ancient tapestries of the Cloisters Museum in New York City.

 http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/search-for-the-unicorn/about-the-tapestries

All humanity has suffered since, without the protection of the unicorns.  Luckily they were not all exterminated.  A few managed to go underground, deep underground, and some perhaps into the abyss of Deep Space.

Unicorns are not in fact horses with a singular horn.

That is just the way artists have depicted them since they were expunged from history manuscripts and archives.

Ted Cruz rips off metaphor from Dennis Kucinich and Alistair Crooke, one year after the term has gone around leftist circles:

Jan. 2015--In his article, Dennis Kucinich quoted historian Alastair Crooke who described "moderate" rebels in Syria as being "rarer than a mythical unicorn,” and warned that “funding Syrian rebels will precipitate a new and wider war in the Middle East.”

“Saudi Arabia, which, with Qatar funded the jihadists in Syria, is now offering to ‘train’ the rebels,” which means that “the sponsors of radical jihadists are going to train ‘moderate’ jihadists,” Kucinich added.

Kucinich also described the US Treasury as becoming the “piggy bank” of ISIS.

“The US has supplied weapons to the Iraqi government and to Syrian rebels which have ended up in the hands of ISIS,” he explained. “As a result, the US Air Force has been bombing Humvees and armored troop carriers purchased with US taxpayer money.”

“We keep hearing from President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Washington Republicans that they’re searching for these mythical moderate rebels. It’s like a purple unicorn. They never exist. These moderate rebels end up being jihadists,” Ted Cruz said [December 2015].

One minor philosopher offered that the mystical symbol -- and the math constant Tau -- was used also many times as a religious symbol -- by priests & scribes throughout recorded history [and passed down to us], be such archives falsified or not, a strong motif can clearly be seen to be carried forward along by some agency or force or entity, that is strongly resistant to the reemergence of something "unicornish". It seems they deeply fear any change or upheaval that could be triggered by this "myth".


The frequent association of the Tau with the Unicorn throughout time, is a mystery in itself why this is repeated in relics of archaeology and anthropology and myth. Also quite telling, is the 'how and the why' in the depiction of the unicorn, by elite and/or secret occult societies, which show quite more often than not, the unicorn ineluctably chained and/or captured or killed.

The YANG Xie Zhi concept, sometimes called Qi, in Chinese sinogram characters is a combination of four concepts.  Life giving water, justice, keeping danger at bay, and the unicorn.

Xie Zhi ancient character

The ancient Chinese symbol for "Yang" or "Qi" (ch'i ) included character for "Law & Justice" in a combination with the "Unicorn" character. Xie Zhi is the Chinese symbol of justice, symbolized by the Chinese unicorn.

Xie Zhi represents fairness, truthfulness and righteousness, as well as valor and vigor. This mythical unicorn creature is said to have a human nature and can understand human languages.

Definitely, shown time and again throughout history, as written by the conquerors, numerous of the most powerful groups on Earth since the Solomonic Era have had a grudge against something to do with what were real unicorns, be they giants or alien beings or paranormal humans, the Jewish Old Testament has them mentioned several times in Hebrew.  The word cannot be translated properly.

But Noah did not allow this creature onto the Ark according to scripture, but he did allow black ravens and vampire bats.  In fact it seems that there were no other creatures that were identified as not allowed onto the Ark.  

Why the UK aristocracy and other worldwide elite clans, for a thousand or more years have put the unicorn in captivity and chained, onto their family crests and treasury coins and shields and military flags, and most valuable tapestries ever made, can you explain it? (read more below)

How can the same identifying word spring up in Korean and Japanese and Greek and Chinese, etc? And why can such a fierce opponent to injustice as the unicorn, in all its versions, only be defeated by using the very cheapest form of deceit? [the main method is using a maiden in harm's way that needs protection, as a ploy to catch the unicorn off guard, as he/she attempts a rescue party]

There has never been an acceptable vivid unicorn description found in any language, but for certain, this creature was of very high importance for one long time on this old planet.

And the majority of the 'LESS THAN ONE PERCENT" elite are quite happy about its demise or retreat from our realm. The unicorns were the top defenders of the 99 Percent, until its forced retreat.

The many Tau symbols [shown below] go along with the unicorn timeline representing its disappearance.

The Tau and Double Tau are favored by Zionists and Hospitallers and Maronites and Antoinites today. Of special note is the triple Tau, which is revered by the highest orders of the Masonics today, particularly in London.  Even inside the secretive Exim Bank near the White House, a form of the Tau is embedded in marble on each floor's lobby. (read much more below)

Something is going on and yet nobody looks into it.  Very few, as in "not enough".

The triple tau, or triple pillars, has astronomical interpretations pertaining to the solstices, equinoxes, the solstitial & equinoctial colures of the celestial spheres and poles, and the relative constellations. The tau cross has other names associated with religion: the crux Commissa, Old Testament, Anticipatory, Advent, or St. Anthony's cross. It is commonly associated with St. Francis, it is a pagan sign of the Mystic Tau of the Chaldeans, and to the Egyptians means “sacred gate”. (read below for more)

Pi, π, it looks just like TAU, is the mathematical symbol for  3.14159........ the infinite series THAT NEVER REPEATS ITSELF!

It is misunderstood still today, why such a number for the ratio of the radius of a circle relative to the circle is so astounding. π is a transcendental number, that is, a number that is not the root of any non-zero polynomial having rational coefficients. This transcendence of π implies that it is impossible to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle with a compass and straightedge. French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre proved in 1794 that π2 (Pi squared) is also irrational.

Various data seems to suggest that the human being, unfortunately being limited to 3 dimensions by his own human nature, engenders upon himself many follies and foils, due to the nature of reality EXCEEEDING 3 or more dimensions, which is being borne out by physics more and more each decade.

Ineffable realities existing in the 4th dimension are abound in the Pi ratio, as old as man's knowledge itself, in that Pi [Tau] is a fractional concept which we have derived from only the 2nd dimension, and not even the 3rd, due mainly to the fact that a circle exists only in a two dimensional flat plane such as drawn on a piece of paper [to further dwell on this paradox, think of the Mobius Strip when the 2-dimensional paper is twisted to exist in 3 dimensions!]. The volume of a sphere, i.e. derived from the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a sphere, in 3-D, regarding celestial spheres or infinitely large and expanding spheres, adds further to any time and space conundrums we might encounter due to the irrational and transcendental value of Pi.

THE UNICORN THEME IN FILMS

The unicorn theme has been looked at again and again in both Hollywood and British films. In Tom Cruise's first film with top billing [he even out bills Tim Curry, who truly carries the movie], LEGEND [1985], by Ridley Scott, Cruise plays a short girlish forest boy with long hair and bangs, a boy who knows that to take a princess to the hiding place of unicorns in the sacred grove is forbidden, yet despite this knowledge, he still takes her there regardless. She mistakenly pacifies the male unicorn with her beauty and innocence and song, thus unfortunately setting up a trap for the unicorn male to be shot and killed with a poison dart by the evil gremlins. The female mare unicorn gets away and is the "last unicorn".

Ridley Scott, whose father was a Colonel in the British Army's Royal Engineers, used the unicorn theme earlier in his 1982 BLADE RUNNER movie, utilizing the legendary unicorn in a dream sequence of Harrison Ford's Deckard character, either to show he was not a replicant, or that androids also dream, and again, with the unicorn origami figure left slyly behind in the end of the story by the Edward James Olmos character. Later in 1992, for the Directors Cut video re-release of BLADE RUNNER, this unicorn dream sequence was embellished with a tie in to a musical score in which Sean Young, as the female replicant who believes she is a human, plays the scored tune on the piano surrounded by photos of her fake parents and non-existent human family relations, while Ford is nearby dreaming of the unicorn, lying down in his bed while sleeping. In the first 1982 release, in this scene, Harrison Ford is alone and tipsy at the piano himself, after too much booze, and he slips into a waking dream, of the unicorn.

THE UNICORN IN MATHEMATICS

'Slim Unicorns' and 'Unicorn paths' are formulated in today's modern topology mathematics: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.5577v1.pdf

UNICORN TOPOLOGICAL CURVE from the link above:

Perturbation torques (TAU) regarding satellites may be divided into three classes:

(1) Short-lived torques (TAU).

(2) Torques (TAU) which vary in an oscillatory manner as a result of the orbital motion of the satellite

round the earth.

(3) Torques (TAU) which tend to produce, a persistent turning moment about the centre of mass of the

satellite.

A very exotic and as yet obscure direction of very exciting study is the possible figure-eight orbit of planets orbiting a star. (Also, there are both clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations, which differences were quite significant in the Hindu & Buddhist & Nazi swastikas.) A planet's celestial poles are the points in the sky where the projection of the planet's axis of rotation intersects the celestial sphere. These points vary because different planets' axes are oriented differently (the apparent positions of the stars also change slightly because of parallax effects). Celestial bodies other than Earth also have similar but differently defined celestial poles.

Watch the video here featuring a lecture by Dr. Michael Hartl: https://youtu.be/2hhjsSN-AiU

WILL TAU [T] soon be used to REPRESENT BOTH "torque" and "2Pi" [a transcendental AND an irrational number]?

(a) Tau [T] is the double of pi. (Tau, the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet, was recently chosen independently as the symbol for 2pi by Michael Hartl, contemporary physicist and mathematician)

Can Pi (π) be squared? No but it can be approximated and the approximations can be squared. Pi is transcendental (it can't be expressed as the root of any polynomial equation with rational coefficients).

However, to calculate the volume of a sphere, find its radius length and plug it into the formula, V = 4/3 π R³.

There are even "unicorn curves" in math now in which the value of Pi is a critical boundary and Tau is used as a variable.  https://alexsisto.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/hyperbolicity-of-the-curve-graph-the-proof-from-the-book/

--More on alleged modern enemies of the unicorns--

John Hancock and John Faneuil and Paul Revere were all French Huguenots and Masonics – they were also PIRATES and Merchant Marines, with historic ties to Barbados Huguenot slave merchants.

Duc de la Rochefoucauld [Middle Ages enemy of UNICORNS?] was a secret society aristocrat and close friend of Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones.

Benjamin Franklin was in FRANCE inside the French Masonic Lodge in April 1778 to attend the induction of Voltaire into the Masonic Lodge.

{notice the mysterious symbolic letters of A & E in the knot used to restrain the unicorn in the Cloister's tapestry}

The Japanese word for unicorn is KIRIN

http://mentalfloss.com/article/64902/why-there-unicorn-british-pound-coin

Why Is There a CHAINED Unicorn on the British Pound Coin?

Freemasonry: The Legacy of the Ancient Egyptians 

Ancient Egyptians and the Constellations

http://ancientegypt.hypermart.net/freemasonry/

TIME TRAVELING UNICORNS?

http://carpathian_bronze.tripod.com/antarii_deck1.html

Many Metaphysical depictions of Tau

Hebrew Tau Temple Tau Triple Tau Jerusalem Holy Royal Arch Tau
Royal Arch Masons of UK, Supreme Grand Chapter, London medallion which features a TRIPLE TAU at its bottom

Temple Royal Arch Freemason stone engraving, Australia

The TAU

TAU is the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet. It was the sign of the Greek god Attis, the Roman god Mithras, and the Druid god Hu. The TAU cross was inscribed on the forehead of every person admitted into the Mysteries of Mithras. When a king was initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries, the TAU was placed against his lips. In ancient Egypt, the TAU represented the Sacred Opening, or gateway, or portal. It was also used to mark sacred water vessels. In fact, the TAU was an important sacred symbol in ancient Egyptian culture and architecture. When sacred TAU’s are joined together horizontally, they represent a temple. In ancient Egypt, huge columns were erected in this fashion. Henges in Britain (Stonehenge) are Sacred Tau’s joined together, very often in a circular design, to form a temple. A double TAU forms a “Dolmen”, like those found in Ireland. The first recorded Judeo-Christian reference to the TAU is from Ezekiel 9:4, “Go through the city of Jerusalem and mark a TAU (usually translated as “make a mark” or “mark a cross,” but in the original Hebrew text the rendition is “mark a taw or tav,” that is, the last letter of the old Hebrew alphabet) on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it”. The TAU was worn by the “Antonians”, also known as the “Hospital Brothers of St. Antony”, a religious community of men founded in 1095 with the purpose of caring for those suffering from the common medieval disease of St. Anthony's fire ("ergotism", e.g., Ergotism is the effect of long-term ergot poisoning, traditionally due to the ingestion of the alkaloids produced by the Claviceps purpurea fungus that infects rye and other cereals, and more recently by the action of a number of ergoline-based drugs. It is also known as ergotoxicosis, ergot poisoning and Saint Anthony's Fire.). Very often when you see St. Antony depicted in medieval art, the TAU is either embroidered on his clothing or he holds a walking stick in the shape of a TAU. It is reasonable to assume, given the prominence of the TAU in the religious and cultural history of Ancient Egypt

TULA : Center of the Milky Way?
TULA, the Center of the Milky Way Galaxy?  TAU is an anagram within the word itself. Tula appeared in Greek mysticism and it represented the Great Mother. Her lore dominated the thinking of the ancients who believed our souls came from Tula and our mission on earth was to learn to return to Tula. According to Greek myths, the heart of Tula beats and vibrations spread throughout the Galaxy. This Central Sun, TULA, was believed to be a fountain of healing energy, healing ‘waters’ or ‘living waters’. It is even considered to be the Holy Grail itself. In the Egyptian Ceremony, “The Weighing of the Heart”, the scale used to weigh the heart is the SACRED TAU and the soul’s eternal destination was determined at this ceremony. The Tau represents balance in this ancient ritual. The TAU symbol also has a number of other meanings in physics, for example, the tau particle, the tau neutrino, and as a symbol for torque.

Order of the Thule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society

IMAGE OF SOCIETY OF THULE

If only the Native American Indians had had UNICORNS to protect them, what would the Planet Earth look like today?

1600s and 1700s mostly Dutch Manhattan Huguenots vs. MontReal Quebec Jesuits in the New World

http://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44539625.pdf

LIVINGSTON family comprised of BOTH Izaak Elchanan Rothschild descended Court Jews & Huguenots

Pursuits: Glassmaking and silk weaving main products, cotton, indigo and tobacco. Once in the Americas in the Carolina Low Country, highly profitable Indian slave trade & African slave trading, cattle ranching, and behemoth rice plantations.

Waterford Ireland glass & crystal is tied to Huguenots, according to several historians.

The hunt and slaughter of legions of whales for their WHALE OIL, was a major commodity of trade for these dynasties, also.

Templar is virtually the same as Huguenot, in many cycles of military history.

John Hancock and John Faneiul and Paul Revere were all French Huguenots and Masonics – they were also PIRATES and 'Merchant Marines'.

Duc de la Rochefoucauld was a secret society aristocrat and close friend of Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones.

https://books.google.ge/books?id=mckOVGD5E0sC&pg=PA106&lpg=PA106&dq=huguenots+and+secret+societies&source=bl&ots=zc0-Zgg0JI&sig=szlMIrUnMhYh3aUdGJvaWLzCmJ4&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=huguenots%20and%20secret%20societies&f=false

Early Postmaster in USA meant "spymaster" and Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster and head of the navy and also keen on the occult arts.  The postmaster had rights to read any private mail he wished, before it was delivered, much like today's NSA..

1600s and 1700s mostly Dutch Manhattan Huguenots vs. MontReal Quebec Jesuits in the New World

Huguenot Elite Merchants' MAISON DE CANUT, EARLY COMPUTER

The Jacquard Loom of Huguenot Lyon silk-making history is a mechanical loom that uses pasteboard cards with punched holes, each card corresponding to one row of the design. Multiple rows of holes are punched in the cards and the many cards that compose the design of the textile are strung together in order. It is based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725).  The "Jacquard loom" played an important role in the development of other programmable machines, such as an early version of the digital compiler used by IBM to develop the modern day computer.

-----------

Owners of HUNT OF UNICORN Cloister's tapestries before the Rockefellers were the Rochefoucalds

Lineage of several members of House of Rouchefoucald

Rochefoucauld Grail

An illustration of King Arthur fighting the Saxons, from 'The Rochefoucauld Grail'

The Rochefoucauld Grail is a four-volume 14th-century illuminated manuscript. Three volumes were formerly Amsterdam. It contains the Lancelot-Grail cycle in French prose, the oldest and most comprehensive surviving version of the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. The hides of about two hundred cows would have been used in the manuscript's production.

Viscounty of Limoges

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Between Limoges, Brive and Périgueux, the viscounts of Limoges, also called viscounts of Ségur created a small principality, whose last heir was Henry IV. Ségur was the main home of these viscounts, in the heart of their domain. The viscounty went from the Limoges-Ségur family to the House of Montfort in Brittany, then to the Albrets and eventually to the Bourbons.

All location castles came under the ownership of the Segur viscounts who were initially abbots or clergy, the Monsbruen-Segur line came to be known as the barons that would fuel both the French and Provençal Kingdoms but also the dominaters of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms throughout Briton and Celtic and Norse lands by intermarriage with the Anglo-Saxon Kings, like the predecessors the Britons, who were a united branch of exiled Greek warriors and criminals who escaped the Turkish domination of the Achaea region of Greece. Rome's only influence were its churches and statesmen in Brittania. The Franco-Ottoman alliance, also called the Franco-Turkish alliance, was an alliance established in 1536 between the king of France Francis I and the Turkish sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent, especially significant in the Balkans and Syria of that time..

Duc de La Rochefoucauld

de La Rochefoucauld

The title of Duke de La Rochefoucauld was a French peerage, one of the most famous families of French nobility, whose origins go back to lord Rochefoucauld in Charente (department) in the 10th and 11th centuries (with official evidence of nobility in 1019). It became Rochefoucauld in the 13th Century.

Hugh I of Lusignan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hugh I (fl. early tenth century), called Venator (Latin for the Hunter), was the first Lord of Lusignan. He is mentioned in the Chronicle of Saint-Maixent. It has been hypothesised that he was the huntsman, ('Le Veneur' in his native French), of the Count of Poitou or the Bishop of Poitiers on the basis of his epithet. He was succeeded by his son, Hugh II Carus, who built the Castle of Lusignan.

The Princes de Condé were a cadet branch of the Bourbons descended from an uncle of Henry IV, and the Princes de Conti were a cadet branch of the Condé. Both houses were prominent in French affairs, even during exile in the French revolution, until their respective extinctions in 1830 and 1814.  When the Bourbons inherited the strongest claim to the Spanish throne, the claim was passed to a cadet Bourbon prince, a grandson of Louis XIV of France, who became Philip V of Spain.

In 1514, Charles, Count of Vendôme had his title raised to Duke of Vendôme. His son Antoine became King of Navarre, on the northern side of the Pyrenees, by marriage in 1555. Two of Antoine's younger brothers were Cardinal Archbishop Charles de Bourbon and the French and Huguenot general Louis de Bourbon, 1st Prince of Condé. Louis' male-line, the Princes de Condé, survived until 1830. Finally, in 1589, the House of Valois died out and Antoine's son Henry III of Navarrebecame Henry IV of France.

NEW YORKER article on HUNT OF THE UNICORNS at the Cloisters [and its ties to esoteric mathematics]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/11/capturing-the-unicorn

[excerpted below]

IMAGE OF TAU OF EXIM BANK [very much like image of Pi]

"The Chudnovsky brothers were using their homemade supercomputer to calculate the number pi, or π, to beyond two billion decimal places. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is one of the most mysterious numbers in mathematics. Expressed in digits, pi begins 3.14159 . . . , and it runs on to an infinity of digits that never repeat. Though pi has been known for more than three thousand years, mathematicians have been unable to learn much about it. The digits show no predictable order or pattern. The Chudnovskys were hoping, very faintly, that their supercomputer might see one.

At the far end of the Cloisters room hung two thirteen-foot-tall sheets of cloth, mounted at right angles to each other, which displayed perfect digital images of, respectively, the front and back of “The Unicorn in Captivity.” We walked up to the two pictures of the unicorn. First, I looked at the front. I could see each thread clearly. The unicorn is spattered with droplets of red liquid, which seems to be blood, although it may be pomegranate juice dripping from fruit in the tree. The threads in the droplets of blood are so deftly woven that they create an illusion that the blood is semi-transparent. The white coat of the unicorn shines through.

I turned to the back of the tapestry. Here the droplets were a more intense red, with clearer highlights, and they seemed to jump out at the eye. The leaves of the flowers were a vibrant, plantlike green. (There are as many as twenty species of flowers in this tapestry. They are depicted with great scientific accuracy—greater than in any of the botany textbooks of the time. They include English bluebells, oxlip, bistort, cuckoopint, and Madonna lily. Botanists haven’t been able to identify a few; it’s possible that they are flowers that have gone extinct since 1500.) On the front, in contrast, the yellow dye in the green leaves has faded a bit, leaving them looking slightly bluish-gray.

David Chudnovsky told me that they were working with I.B.M. to design what may be the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The machine, code-named C64, is being built for a United States government agency. It’s rather like It, multiplied many times over, though nothing in C64 will come from Home Depot. When the machine is finished, it will contain two million processors and fourteen thousand hard drives. It will use two and a half million watts of electricity—enough to power a few thousand homes. Two thousand gallons of water per minute will flow through the core of C64 to keep it cool. If the pumps fail, it will melt down in less than ten seconds.

Look here at the A&E mystery symbology on Cloisters HUNT OF THE UNICORN tapestries

In 1998, the Cloisters—the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan—began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn” hang. The Unicorn tapestries are considered by many to be the most beautiful tapestries in existence. They are also among the great works of art of any kind. In the tapestries, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by hunters and hounds, pursue a unicorn through forested landscapes. They find the animal, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, “The Unicorn in Captivity,” the unicorn is shown bloody but alive, chained to a tree surrounded by a circular fence, in a field of flowers. The tapestries are twelve feet tall and up to fourteen feet wide (except for one, which is in fragments). They were woven from threads of dyed wool and silk, some of them gilded or wrapped in silver, around 1500, probably in Brussels or Liège, for an unknown person or persons, and for an unknown reason—possibly to honor a wedding. A monogram made from the letters “A” and “E” is woven into the scenery in many places; no one knows what it stands for. The tapestries’ meaning is mysterious: the unicorn was a symbol of many things in the Middle Ages, including Christianity, immortality, wisdom, lovers, marriage. For centuries, the tapestries were in the possession of the La Rochefoucauld family of France. In 1922, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought them for just over a million dollars, and in 1937 he gave them to the Cloisters. Their monetary value today is incalculable.

Bridgers told them, “I have a real-world problem for you.”

David left the Met carrying seventy of the CDs of the Unicorn tapestries. He and Gregory planned to feed the data into It and try to join the tiles together into seamless images of the tapestries. The images would be the largest and most complex digital photographs of any art work ever made, for the time. “This will be easy,” David said to Barbara Bridgers as he left. He was wrong.

“We thought to ourselves that it would be just a bit of number crunching,” Gregory said.

But, David said, “it wasn’t trivial.”

The brothers had a fairly easy time setting up the tiles on It. When they tried to fit the puzzle pieces together, however, they wouldn’t join properly—the warp and weft threads didn’t run smoothly from one tile to the next. The differences were vast. It was as if a tapestry had not been the same object from one moment to the next as it was being photographed. Sutures were visible. The result was a sort of Frankenstein version of the Unicorn tapestries. The Chudnovskys had no idea why.

David, in exasperation, called up Barbara Bridgers. “Somebody has been fooling around with these numbers,” he said to her.

Then the brothers really began to dig into the numbers. Working with Tom Morgan, they created something called a vector field, and they used it to analyze the inconsistencies in the images.

The tapestries, they realized, had changed shape as they were lying on the floor and being photographed. They had been hanging vertically for centuries; when they were placed on the floor, the warp threads relaxed. The tapestries began to breathe, expanding, contracting, shifting. It was as if, when the conservators removed the backing, the tapestries had woken up. The threads twisted and rotated restlessly. Tiny changes in temperature and humidity in the room had caused the tapestries to shrink or expand from hour to hour, from minute to minute. The gold- and silver-wrapped threads changed shape at different speeds and in different ways from the wool and silk threads.

“We found out that a tapestry is a three-dimensional structure,” Gregory went on. “It’s made from interlocked loops of wool.”

“The loops move and change,” David said.

“The tapestry is like water,” Gregory said. “Water has no permanent shape.”

The photographers had placed a thin sheet of gray paper below the edge of the part of the tapestry they were shooting. Each time they moved the camera, they also moved the sheet of paper. Though the paper was smooth and thin, it tugged the tapestry slightly as it moved, creating ripples. It stretched the weft threads and rotated the warp threads—it resonated through the tapestry. All this made the tiles impossible to join without the use of higher mathematics.

A color digital photograph is composed of pixels. A pixel is the smallest picture element that contains color. The Unicorn tapestries are themselves made up of the medieval equivalent of pixels—a single crossing of warp and weft is the smallest unit of color in the image. The woven pixels were maddening because they moved constantly. The brothers understood, at last, that it would be necessary to perform vast seas of calculations upon each individual pixel in order to make a complete image of a tapestry. Each pixel had to be calculated in its relationship to every other nearby pixel, a mathematical problem, known as an N-problem, big enough to practically choke It. They decided to concentrate on just one of the tapestries, “The Unicorn in Captivity.” Gregory said, “This was a math problem similar to the analysis of DNA or speech recognition—”

“Look, my dear fellow, it was a real nightmare,” David said.

“This is like forensics,” Gregory explained. “If the photographers had touched it, we would have seen it in the numbers. The camera was also moving vertically and horizontally a little bit. This made the sizes of the weaves not quite right from place to place. The camera lens itself distorted it a little bit.”

Two of the tiles on the front of “The Unicorn in Captivity” had an eerie green tinge. While the photographers were shooting them, someone had apparently opened a door leading to the next room, where a fluorescent light was on, causing a subtle flare. The Chudnovskys corrected the lighting by using the color on the back threads as a reference.

“It took us three months of computation,” Gregory said. “We should have just dropped it.”

The final assembly of the image took twenty-four hours inside the nodes of It.

Most of the floor consisted of a vast digital image, in color, showing a hundred and fifteen different equations arranged in a vast spiral that breaks up into waves near the walls—a whirlpool of mathematics.

The equations are a type known as a hypergeometric series. Among other things, they rapidly produce the digits of pi. The Chudnovskys discovered most of them; others were found by the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, in the early twentieth century, and by Leonhard Euler, in the eighteenth century. On one corner of the floor there is a huge digital image of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “Melencolia I.” In it, Melancholy is sitting lost in thought, surrounded by various strange objects, including a magic square and a polyhedron, with an unknown number of sides, called Dürer’s solid. The Chudnovskys suspect that Dürer’s solid is more curious mathematically than meets the eye.

 

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