51–60 of 131 posts
Besides tiling your bathroom is there any use case for this? Or is this pure for fun and gaining knowledge? Edit: The article is talking about building structures but isn't a triangle the most rigid form? And triangles are already used in building.
EDIT: I found these, at least http://www.ballerhouse.com/2010/08/19/precision-concrete-til...
"Attack on the pentagon" ...aaaand the guardian has lowered themselves to buzzfeed's standards.
Besides tiling your bathroom is there any use case for this? Or is this pure for fun and gaining knowledge? Edit: The article is talking about building structures but isn't a triangle the most rigid form? And triangles are already used in building.
Can I actually tile my bathroom with tiles like this? Do any tile manufacturers make them that shape? EDIT: I found these, at least http://www.ballerhouse.com/2010/08/19/precision-concrete-til...
"That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James’ discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice
that's awesome. Outsider math and outsider art deserve as much respect as "outsider" programming ( startups / garage hackers ) garner. Creating semi-closed communities of insiders, united by what are essentially arcane handshakes, and dismissive of value emerging outside of themselves, is really just both a narrow-mindedness that doesn't behoove innovation and also an admission of an unnecessary insecurity about the…
If you're looking at the tiny subset of outsider science that's chosen for correctness and publication-worthiness, of course you'll be enthusiastic about it. But these people, like Marjorie Rice, aren't really facing any obstacles from the establishment! If their work has merit, they usually get a warm welcome.
The elephant in the room is that >99% of outsider science is extremely bad, and can't understand why it's bad even after repeated explanations. Pretty much all the people complaining about the scientific establishment are like "fermatists", who used to hover around math institutes to have their proofs of FLT checked. If you're not familiar with such people, I urge you to actually look at a sample of their work and form your own opinion.
After that I think you'll be less eager to throw accusations around. A scientist's life is hard enough already, without people telling her she's an insecure evil fascist for rejecting torsion fields, the EmDrive, or Time Cube.
Many of these types are basically combining two pentagons into an octagon (or even hexagon) then tiling it across the plane. For some reason, intuitively those seem more easy to me (2 * 3, 2 * 4), so that you could just generate a bunch of them, and split them in two to create tessellating pentagons? Even the example in the article can be viewed as a regularly tessellating nonagon. I don't see what's "irregular" abou…
"just generate a bunch of them, and split them in two"
Try splitting a 'random' polygon into a set of identical convex (regular or irregular) pentagons.
"what's "irregular" about it?": this has been answered, but for completeness: the sides and angles of the pentagons aren't all identical.
For those interested in the subject here is an interesting video about using penrose tiling for street tiling in Helsinki, Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxlEojkVJ0c
http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2011/02/26/penrose-tiling/ http://www.bdonline.co.uk/foa%E2%80%99s-peninsula-patterns-f...
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CrystallographyRestriction.html
I can't tell by eye-balling it what the symmetry is for the first one, but its periodicity says it must be one of those. Quasicrystals with 5-fold symmetry are not exactly periodic.
There are only 17 wallpaper groups. Since this is a wallpaper, what is its group?
Kudos for not using the same clickbait title The Guardian did. Journalistic integrity is dead.
Meta question: where can I find list of simple unsolved/undiscovered problems like these in math? It does not appear in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...