Because the Qur'an forbids the depiction of living things in religious art, medieval Islamic architects covered mosques and palaces with intricate patterns called girih. It was assumed that the patterns were created using a compass and a straightedge, but now it seems that ancient Muslims may have stumbled on some advanced geometry, not discovered in the Western world until 500 years later. In an article appearing in Science this week, physicists from Harvard and Princeton report that some of the girih were created using sets of geometric tiles. The authors describe one aperiodic, or non-repeating, pattern on a 15th century shrine in Afghanistan that uses just five different shapes of tiles. The most famous aperiodic tiling pattern uses two different shapes. It is known as “Penrose tiling,” after Oxford University mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, who discovered it in 1974. Funny side note: in 1997 Penrose sued the Kimberly Clark company over their Kleenex quilted toilet paper, claiming that the pattern was too close to the one that bears his name. There’s also a bit of a kerfuffle over the Science paper because another researcher, Emil Makovick of the University of Copenhagen, claims he pointed out the similarity between girih and Penrose tiling first. So the take home message I guess is don’t cross a math nerd.
Finding Math in the Muslim World
Because the Qur’an forbids the depiction of living things in religious art, medieval Islamic architects covered mosques and palaces with intricate patterns called girih. It was assumed that the patterns were created using a compass and a straightedge, but now it seems that ancient Muslims may have stumbled on some advanced geometry, not discovered in […]
