Posted on 01/17/2008 7:24:05 AM PST by forkinsocket
The mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th- to 17th-century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West.
Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as a quasi crystal—an infinite tiling pattern that doesn’t regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals (see video below). Lu teamed up with physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University to test the similarity: If the patterns repeated when extended infinitely, they couldn’t be true quasi crystals.
Most of the patterns examined failed the test, but one passed: a pattern found in the Darb-i Imam shrine (seen in the first video above), built in 1453 in Isfahan, Iran. Not only does it never repeat when infinitely extended, its pattern maps onto Penrose tiles—components for making quasi crystals discovered by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s—in a way that is consistent with the quasi crystal pattern.
Among the 3,700 tiles Lu and Steinhardt mapped, there are only 11 tiny flaws, tiles placed in the wrong orientation. Lu argues that these are accidents possibly introduced during centuries of repair. “Art historians always suspected there must be something more to these patterns,” says Tom Lentz, director of Harvard University Art Museums, but they were never examined with “this kind of scientific rigor.”
GGG sumpthin’
To bad they’ve gone backward.
I think they copied mathematics from the Persians
Nonsense, now please go to your nearest mosque so that you can be decapitated. Sincerely, the religion of peace. /sarc
Helen Thomas was the on-the-scene reporter.
I’m sure they demolished the existing structure, stole the pattern and built their mosque over it.
Also, looking for a non-repeating series is hard -- but I'm sure it gets a lot easier if you're willing to overlook the 11 flaws in the series.
Stole is more like it!!
I wonder if this is like the Bible Codes and that sort of thing - if you look for patterns you eventually find them - and then you explain away any discrepancies when they don’t fit your theory.
Islam is such a blight on the whole world that extolling any contributions it may have made in the past is like putting lipstick on a pig.
Is it several mosques show this “ability” or one mosque?
Are these 11 flaws in the one mosque that “passed the test”?
If they are, why should they be ignored?
BS. Mooselimbs have never discovered anything. Ever.
Besides, you don’t get credit for a discovery in math unless it’s accompanied by a proof. In other words, you have to know what you’re doing. You cannot simply be a stupid monkey with a paintbrush.
LOL!
And it’s been all downhill for them ever since...
Yes. Lu claims that the flaws are due to the repair accidents.
There are thousands or more of possible tile shapes that can generate a "quasicrystal" or "aperiodic tiling" or "Penrose tiling."
In fact, any decagon-shaped tile that overlaps two ways generates a quasicrystal pattern.
So, of the millions of mosaics made by Muslim floor tilers over an 800 year period, exactly one decided to use a standard Muslim girih decagon with a slightly different decorative flourish that happened to generate a quasicrystal.
This was not the work of an Islamic mathematician coming up with an ingenious equation which he then used to create the tiles. It was the work of an artisan who liked making fancy-looking tiles, and this particular one randomly happened to have an interesting property.
There is no record that any Muslim even noticed this pattern as being extraordinary in any way other than its attractiveness or that it had any mathematical import.
To be perfectly fair, Ms. Thomas was just a cub reporter at the time.
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