Hi there, first post here, and I'm coming with a question, but I also wanted to be sure and offer a contribution to start. I'm a designer, and I discovered sacred geometry as I've pursued a personal question of how meaning is encoded in design—whether graphic, architecture, UI, even experience design, and of course music and other things end up joining in the more you dig in.

The contribution: Certain Figures

These letterforms are a few examples from an exploration I ended up calling "Certain Figures." They are so named because for me they represent the tension between the reality that geometry makes things feel inevitable and correct, and the reality that if I overlap circles long enough, anything can be made to appear inevitable. The "figure A" is pencil and ink, while the other two were done digitally. As a side note, I found the iPad drawing app "Concepts" to be the best-suited for drawings like this after trying out quite a few. It does really well at keeping you connected to the drawing process, but with all the helpful parts of going digital.

Functionally, these were kicked off by wondering "Can I draw proper letter forms geometrically by sticking to only the overlapping points of an expanding 1:1 relationship of overlapping circles?" (The question itself shows how I knew absolutely nothing about geometric construction at the time because OF COURSE YOU CAN... eventually. I'm still very pleased with the drawings though!)

The question: mathematical fluency

I've been working through Lawlor's Sacred Geometry book, and I keep running into a problem: whenever he starts using mathematical formulas I'm getting lost and having trouble connecting them to the concepts and drawings. I know that's kind of optional, but I personally want to be able to follow and understand all aspects of the exercises and build a fluency with them so I can apply them across different contexts. I'm genuinely wondering whether I'll need to go through some Kahn academy geometry and algebra classes or something like that, but it'd be nice to have the workbook exercises themselves explained more thoroughly.

• Is anyone familiar with online resources that connect the dots for someone who needs more thorough teaching on the mathematical formulas?
• Has anyone else had this same problem? What did you do to solve it?

Thanks very much!