mathmajik: In 1974, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, created a revolutionary set of tiles tha
mathmajik: In 1974, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, created a revolutionary set of tiles that could be used to cover an infinite plane in a pattern that never repeats. In 1982, Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli crystallographer, discovered a metallic alloy whose atoms were organized unlike anything ever observed in materials science. Penrose garnered public renown on a scale rarely seen in mathematics. Shechtman won the Nobel Prize. Both scientists defied human intuition and changed our basic understanding of nature’s design, revealing how infinite variation could emerge within a highly ordered environment.At the heart of their breakthroughs is “forbidden symmetry,” so-called because it flies in the face of a deeply ingrained association between symmetry and repetition. Symmetry is based on axes of reflection—whatever appears on one side of a line is duplicated on the other. In math, that relationship is reflected in tiling patterns. Symmetrical shapes such as rectangles and triangles can cover a plane with neither gap nor overlap, and in an ever-repeating pattern. Repeated patterns are called “periodic” and are said to have “translational symmetry.” If you move a pattern from place to place, it looks the same.Penrose, a bold, ambitious scientist, was interested less in identical patterns and repetition, and more in infinite variation. To be precise, he was interested in “aperiodic” tiling, or sets of tiles that can cover an infinite plane with neither gap nor overlap, without the tiling pattern ever repeating itself. That was a challenge because he couldn’t use tiles with two, three, four, or six axes of symmetry—rectangles, triangles, squares, and hexagons—because on an infinite plane they would result in periodic or repeated patterns. That meant he had to rely on shapes believed to leave gaps in the tiling of a plane—those with forbidden symmetries.Read more: http://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry -- source link
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