Posted on 02/22/2007 6:15:51 PM PST by xcamel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Magnificently sophisticated geometric patterns in mediaeval Islamic architecture indicate their designers achieved a mathematical breakthrough 500 years earlier than Western scholars, scientists said on Thursday.
By the 15th century, decorative tile patterns on these masterpieces of Islamic architecture reached such complexity that a small number boasted what seem to be "quasicrystalline" designs, Harvard University's Peter Lu and Princeton University's Paul Steinhardt wrote in the journal Science.
Only in the 1970s did British mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry.
"Oh, it's absolutely stunning," Lu said in an interview. "They made tilings that reflect mathematics that were so sophisticated that we didn't figure it out until the last 20 or 30 years."
Lu and Steinhardt in particular cite designs on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, built in 1453.
Islamic tradition has frowned upon pictorial representations in artwork. Mosques and other grand buildings erected by Islamic architects throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere often are wrapped in rich, intricate tile designs setting out elaborate geometric patterns.
The walls of many mediaeval Islamic structures display sumptuous geometric star-and-polygon patterns. The research indicated that by 1200 an important breakthrough had occurred in Islamic mathematics and design, as illustrated by these geometric designs.
"You can go through and see the evolution of increasing geometric sophistication. So they start out with simple patterns, and they get more complex" over time, Lu added.
ISLAMIC ACHIEVEMENTS
While Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, Islamic culture flourished beginning in the 7th century, with achievements over numerous centuries in mathematics, medicine, engineering, ceramics, art, textiles, architecture and other areas.
Lu said the new revelations suggest Islamic culture was even more advanced than previously thought.
While travelling in Uzbekistan, Lu said, he noticed a 16th century Islamic building with decagonal motif tiling, arousing his curiosity as to the existence of quasicrystalline Islamic tilings.
The sophistication of the patterns used in Islamic architecture has intrigued scholars worldwide.
Emil Makovicky of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark in the 1990s noticed the relationship between these designs and a form of quasicrystalline designs. Makovicky was interested in particular in an 1197 tomb in Maragha, Iran.
Joshua Socolar, a Duke university physicist, said it is unclear whether the mediaeval Islamic artisans fully understood the mathematical properties of the patterns they were making.
"It leads you to wonder whether they kind of got lucky," Socolar said in an interview. "But the fact remains that the patterns are tantalizingly close to having the structure that Penrose discovered in the mid-70s."
"And it will be a lot of fun if somebody turns up bigger tilings that sort of make a more convincing case that they understood even more of the geometry than the present examples show," Socolar said.
In fact, my perspective is far deeper than culture. My worldview is based on my understanding of God, in Christ, through the Christian Scriptures, and the knowledge that God created all of us in His image, regardless of what false religions and barbaric cultures may have done to some of us.
There were great thinkers who espoused the Islamic religion in the middle ages. That is a fact. Their faith was wrong, but their minds were created by God, no less than our own.
We, on the other hand, discovered and developed everything from scratch.
Scientific discoveries, then, are not observing and putting to use the order that exists in the natural world, but inventing something that has not previously existed?
Who woulda thunk a bunch of ones & zeros could be so useful?
That was my point, though I didn't make it well. Indeed they were Rome, in law, tradition, and structure, just not religion. They twice reconquered most of the empire. When Rome fell alot of the intellectual capital and important families went to Byzantium and integrated as the cultures were basically the same. And like Rome their architectural achievements were second to none.
Granted, Europe went backwards in alot of areas, especially trade and stability with the fall of the Western Empire, but the Germanics were Romanized enough that they didn't fall back across the board into primitive barbarian tribes either. The Franks, Goths, and others were already on the move into what would eventually be the Holy Roman Empire in what was a desire to put civilization back together with a successor state to Rome. The Byzantines honored a number of those attempts if I recall.
Through all that, the Byzantines were there. So Europe may have went dark in some respects after the fall of Rome, but Western civilization did not die either in my opinion. And Europe kept open ties to the Byzantines, so they had access to knowledge and culture. Worse off in many ways due to the lack of order and trade than when they were under Rome, but not totally out of the loop either.
As you said, civilization eventually transferred back to the Western part of the Empire, or rather the tiny remnants of it that still flourished around Rome, with the advance of the Muslims and a more stable, Christianized Europe. The thread of Western Civilization was never really lost, despite what the Muslim apologists want to believe.
True. Unfortunately, the multiculti's are out in force to denigrate the greatest civilization in history - Christendom - and to extol one of the most backward. If one talks to ethic Chaldeans today they will point out that most of what is attributed to Islam's golden age was the work of the residual influence of the Christian cultures that the Mohammedans overran. The reason Islam's cultural advances stopped in the 8th or 9th centuries was that Islam destroyed what remained of the influence of those cultures over a few generations.
Mohammed, barbeque sauce be upon him, destroyed the advanced Christian civilizations of the Middle East. That is the actual accomplishment of Islam.
That is true. Everything after that was just a re-hash of what went before. That's because the idea of REASON was tossed out, for the most part, in favor of the fatalism that passes for Islam today.
Math ping!!
LOL! SARUMAN!
Not meant to be racist, sorry if it came out that way.
I apologize.
Yet look at today. Few would argue that the PRC is the most advanced country on the planet. The same with India. Although you could argue that the inference of Muslims during Mughul rule interrupted Indian science, in a way even that was a golden age in Indian history. Much of the subcontinent was unified--something that was relatively rare up to that point. The Taj Mahal was made during that era. As for China, the Muslim argument doesn't hold. Islam has had only limited impact on Chinese development, though there were some Muslims in China (there were also Christians). Most of the advanced world was about the same until the European "discovery" of the Americas which brought in huge amounts of resources, and impetus for further discovery (encountering new foods, medicines, etc.), and then later the Industrial Revolution in northern Europe and the United States. Then was when the West shot far ahead of the rest of the world--and figuratively China, India, and the Islamic world were kept in the dust.
Yes, I guess one reason I liked Spirograph is that I got it back in the dark ages, before other more distracting toys appeared.
The Egyptians had a steam engine. They just used it to raise and lower a gate. Nothing else. For some reason, (lack of freedom, a heavy caste system, no patent office, no capitalism, etc.) they never developed anything further.
For some reason, (lack of freedom, no patent office, backward ideas on everything else, no capitalism, etc.) the islamic world never understood or advanced beyond this questionable discovery). And... what is the greatness of this advanced geometry? Does it make space flight possible, does it allow the control of gravity, does it allow for anything practical or any invention in the entire universe, does it allow for the creation of any medicine, or anything?
By the way, what member of the satanic blood cult stole this idea from someone else?
Well, I'm glad the Rosetta Stone is in London. The Brits are taking good care of it there. God only knows what the Muzzies would have done with it by now. And I surely would not have visited it there.
There are many more freepers who will never apologize for what they truly intended to be racist comments.
These threads abound with them, and they are never retracted.
How "golden" the reign of the Mughals might have been is arguable. Islam had had about eight centuries of contact with the Hindus by the time of the Mughal Empire, mostly in northwest India and about 300 years of Muslim sultans based in Delhi. By the time the Mughals came, Islam had long since "acquired" the sciences developed by the Hindus.
The reason Chinese science stagnated was that the Taoist view of the natural world conflicted with what science told them (no biological basis for "chi meridians" in anatomy, for example). As for India and the rest of the Islamic world, I maintain that it was due to the influence of Islam as a major religious and political power that they lacked any further development.
Again, my coreligionists from Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan would appreciate it if you stopped conflating Arab with Muslim simply because a large majority of Arabs worldwide, and almost all Arabs in the Middle East are Muslim.
My bishop is an Arab-American, whose ancestors came from a valley in Syria the Arabic name of which means, "The Valley of the Christians" because they have been resisting the jihad and holding on to Orthodox Christianity since the days of Mohammed.
mark & bump
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