Shape

106 I What Makes It Visual?
Table 2
Constituents Defined by Calculating
Shape
Atoms
forgotten—as soon as I use a rule again. The parts I see can change at any time depending
on how I calculate. It’s entirely a matter of embedding—of tracing parts according
to rules as I go along.
Descriptions aren’t set when I calculate by seeing, but this doesn’t mean that
they aren’t useful. They are—only in a retrospective account of what I’ve done. I can
describe the shapes in the series
with topologies. These show that the reflection from the initial shape to the final shape
is continuous, albeit triangles and chevrons are woefully tangled up in the star. They
also show how the shapes in the series are divided into constituents as my rules are
applied to calculate. My topologies for the shapes are Boolean algebras with the atoms
in table 2. (The tips of chevrons are aligned to show how atoms compare from shape to
shape.) There are different types of topologies that work just as well. But mine are nice
and easy, and they’re enough to illustrate what’s important right now.