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Hundreds of years ago in Japan, people offered thanks to the gods by sacrificing a horse or a pig. Horses and pigs, however, were valuable and expensive, so poor folks had a hard time expressing their gratitude. So they came up with a solution: Rather than sacrificing a horse, they would simply draw a painting of a horse on a wooden tablet and hang it in the temple. Then someone, most likely an impoverished samurai, realized that horses and pigs were hardly the only thing that could be drawn on a tablet. He had the idea of painting something original,...

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...

My 9th grader needs to write a 10 page term paper for her 10th grade honors math class. (Which I find strange). Anyway she is having a difficult time choosing a topic - it cannot be a biography. She was thinking about writing about math used in computer graphics, but she is having a difficult time finding sources that are written anywhere near her level. She needs at least one text as a source - it cannot all be from the internet. Any of you math teachers, general brainiacs, computer geniuses etc. out there who could offer suggestions on a...

Close window Published online: 22 February 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070219-9 Islamic tiles reveal sophisticated mathsMuslim artists were 500 years ahead of western researchers.Philip Ball The pattern on the Darb-i Imam shrine, built in 1453, is almost identical to Penrose tilings, discovered in 1973. Click here for a larger image K. Dudley and M. Elliff The complex geometrical designs used centuries ago in Islamic art and architecture were planned with a tiling system that was not discovered in the West until five centuries later, two physicists have claimed. Islamic tiling patterns were put together not with a compass and ruler, as...

Hyperbolic space is an unimaginable concept, unless you're a Latvian mathematician who's handy with needle and yarn. ___ On a Thursday night in Ithaca, New York, Daina Taimina, an ebullient blond mathematician at Cornell University, sits at her kitchen table with her husband, David Henderson, a Cornell professor of geometry. In front of her sits a big Chinese bowl filled with crinkled forms made of gray, blue, red, and purple yarn. Reaching into the bowl, Taimina pulls out a woozy multicolored surface, the likes of which would have delighted Dr. Seuss. "This is an octagon with a 45 degree angle...

My daughtetr is doing simple proofs in her first month of high school geometry. She understands how to build a proof but the teacher has her labeling proofs that are already built and she is having difficulties making the correct choices. My math and geometery ability approaches nil. Is there someone out there who could point me to a link that explains labeling already made up proofs? Thank you.

<p>Professors Paul Chaikin, left, and Salvatore Torquato used M&M candies to reveal fundamental principles governing the random packing of particles.</p> <p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Princeton physicist Paul Chaikin's passion for M&M's candies was so well known that his students played a sweet practical joke on him by leaving a 55-gallon drum of the candies in his office.</p>