Science Behind Rangoli

Rangoli has two literatures. The first is the practice’s own — designs held in memory, taught at the threshold, renewed every morning. The second is a research literature, now half a century deep, in which mathematicians, computer scientists, and anthropologists describe what the practice builds — lately in constructive terms, with formal rules that generate every possible design and exact results such as the loop-count arithmetic described in The One-Line Problem. This chapter follows the second literature without ever mistaking it for the first: the science describes the art; it does not define it. Its member essay surveys what formal study has found, and says plainly where the research record is still thin.