WASHINGTON – Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years. Historians have long ...

When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. The Harvard graduate student in physics was fascinated by the beautiful and ...

Medieval Islamic designers used elaborate geometrical tiling patterns at least 500 years before Western mathematicians developed the concept. The geometric design, called “girih”, was widely used to ...

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 ...

Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years. Historians have long assumed that sheer ...

Medieval Islamic artisans seem to have developed a procedure for creating jigsawlike mosaics that ultimately led them to an exotic pattern that mathematicians would discover nearly half a millennium ...

Patterning and periodic structures are very important in physics. This led to a tremendous amount of work on learning what shapes can tile an area or fill a volume. It was found that these shapes must ...

Islamic architects and mathematicians were creating quasi-crystalline patterns some 500 years before similar patterns were described in the West, claim two physicists in the US. Peter J Lu of Harvard ...

The university community is invited to hear from Peter Lu, a physicist at Harvard University, about the mathematics underlying the patterns of medieval Islamic art. His lecture is titled “Girih Tiles: ...

What is culture? In today’s globalized world, we are familiar with seeing various cultural objects and ornamentation outside of their original location or context. If culture is not fixed and bound to ...