The lemnsicate can represent the zero set of two points, tucked within a complex polynomial equation. It's also what we know as the symbol of infinity.

If you were to ride on the lemnsicate like a twisted NASCAR track, you'd keep going forever and never get to the end.

A strange symbol for infinity, really. Also known mathematically as Watt's Curve and Devil's Curve, among many descriptions. It's a number - but not a real number. It's a concept - but not a concept. Like consciousness. Like feeling.

Like the universe.

In his 1584 book, "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds," the Italian astronomer (and of course, philosopher) Giordano Bruno, postulated an unbound universe where, "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds."

This is an amazing treatise, considering it was published some thirty years prior to Galileo's stand-off with the Catholic Church on the Aristotelian view that the earth was the center of the universe. And considering we didn't need to wait for Carl Sagan to give us his opinions. We knew it in the 16th century.

But this kind of infinity in the physical universe is metaphorically different from the mathematical lemnsicate. Astronomical radio studies seem to indicate that space - that the universe - is flat. Which means that that infinity stretches to a point of no return. Unlike the lemnsicate. An unimaginable topographical concept - perhaps not best represented by the lazy figure 8.

In mathematical circles, John Wallis first "discovered" it forty years after Galileo's disagreement with the Romans. But mystically, linguistically and religiously, it was there long before Wallis.

And it has far more interesting origins. From India, it was passed into the Arabic numerical system. Metaphysically and artistically, it spent millennia as a representation of balanced opposites; male and female, night and day, darkness and light.

These balanced opposites are almost a re-constituted Yin-Yang, an ancient Chinese symbol of complementary opposites. In Daoist metaphysics, the belief is that these dualistic forces are actually moral judgements and therefore they are only perceptual - that they aren't real. They're an indivisible whole. This is also tinctured in Buddhist precepts.

The lemnsicate symbol can also be found in the elaborate Arabic calligraphic renderings of the Name of God; the elegant loops providing a decorative device as well as pointing toward the idea of eternity.

On this track of infinity, there are metaphysical elements of the universe, of God and of morality. Of perfect opposites - male and female, darkness and light, life and death.

Mixing all these symbols and metaphors and real math together, what can we make of infinity? If it's a concept, then can it be rationalized by literature or science or religion?

Michelangelo, like Mozart, da Vinci, and Plato - is an old, knowing soul. And Michelangelo, in a moment of elemental wisdom, gave us his answer. With his brush, he painted God touching us as he created Adam - across the universe and across infinity.

In a perfect template of the lemnsicate.

We are all on this funny, twisted track. And few of us know - or could ever understand - if we are just human beings in born bodies or something more. Could we be creations made within infinity itself - souls that live in metaphysical worlds within the lemnsicate?

Are we on a journey that never begins - and never really ends?

#art and math

Michelangelo's Lemnsicate