(Photograph: Michael Lavin Flower)

Rachel Fletcher was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1947 and was raised there. She began her career in lighting and stage design for the theater with degrees from Hofstra University (B.A. in theater arts), SUNY Albany (M.A. in dramatic literature), and Humboldt State University (M.F.A. in lighting/stage design). She has been a faculty member of the New York School of Interior Design since 1996 and a contributing editor to the Nexus Network Journal since 2005. Her professional work designing theatrical spaces led to an interest in the principles of geometric proportion and harmony as a design system, including time as a geometer and teacher of geometry and proportion for school-age children and adult professionals and at dozens of universities, museums, and institutions in the United States and Europe. In this capacity, she received an International Center for Jefferson Studies Fellowship Award from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to study geometric proportions in Jefferson's architectural works. Fletcher was the creator/curator of the museum exhibits "Infinite Measure," "Design by Nature," and "Harmony by Design: The Golden Mean" and the author of the latter's exhibit catalog. As a community activist, she is the founding director of the Housatonic River Walk in her home town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which was designated a National Recreation Trail by the National Park Service in 2009, and the co-director of the Upper Housatonic Valley African-American Heritage Trail. For her significant contributions to conservation and civic improvements, she has received an Environmental Merit Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, citations from the Garden Club of America, and the National Urban Hometown River Award in Grassroots Activism from American Rivers, among other honors.

ABOUT THE ESSAYIST

Kim Williams is a writer and editor living and working in Italy. She received her degree in architectural studies from the University of Texas in Austin, and is licensed as an architect in New York State. Her apprenticeship was done in the offices of Philip Johnson in New York City. She became interested in mathematics and architecture while writing Italian Pavements: Patterns in Space (Houston: Anchorage Press, 1997) about the role of decorated pavements in the history of Italian architecture. In 1996, she began the international conference series "Nexus: Architecture and Mathematics" and, in 1999, founded the Nexus Network Journal to provide a dedicated venue for scholarly research in architecture and mathematics. In 2000, Williams founded Kim Williams Books, an independent, peer-reviewed press for books about architecture and mathematics. Williams has published many articles in scholarly journals on the use of mathematical principles in architecture, including Mathematical Intelligencer and Leonardo, and her drawings have been displayed in both group and solo exhibits. Her latest book, with Lionel March and Stephen Wassell, is The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010).