Study finds advanced 20th-century geometry in 15th-century tilings

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Were finding widespread evidence for the same approach being used for 500 years across the Islamic world says Peter J. Lu a graduate student in physics. Again and again girih tiles provide logical explanations for complicated designs. Photo: Stephani ...
"We're finding widespread evidence for the same approach being used for 500 years across the Islamic world," says Peter J. Lu, a graduate student in physics. "Again and again, girih tiles provide logical explanations for complicated designs." Photo: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office

Intricate decorative tilework found in medieval architecture across the Islamic world appears to exhibit advanced decagonal quasicrystal geometry -- a concept discovered by Western mathematicians and physicists only in the 1970s and 1980s. If so, medieval Islamic application of this geometry would predate Western mastery by at least half a millennium.


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