MEDIEVAL Islamic tilers, long renowned for the beauty of their designs, now seem to have been even more skilled than we appreciated. Working with only a straight edge and compasses, they managed to create intricate geometric patterns that wouldn’t be understood by western mathematicians for at least 500 years.
They did it, says Peter Lu of Harvard University, because they understood Penrose tiles – a way of tiling two geometric shapes in a pattern that doesn’t quite repeat itself but that has five-fold rotational symmetry. Patterns like this were thought to be impossible until the mathematician Roger Penrose showed how…
