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The wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture are disguising a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years, according to new research. For a long time, historians have assumed that sheer hard work with the equivalent of a ruler and compass allowed medieval craftsmen to create the ornate star-and-polygon tile patterns that cover mosques, shrines and other buildings from Turkey to India. Now a Harvard University researcher argues that more than 500 years ago, long before Western scholars gained a good understanding of geometry, mathematicians in the Islamic world met up with the artists and began creating far more complex tile patterns that culminated in what mathematicians today call “quasi-crystalline designs”, which did not appear in the West until the 1970s. Quasi-crystals are made by fitting together a set of shapes into patterns that, unlike typical tile floors, don’t repeat. In an article published by the journal Science, Peter J. Lu and Paul Steinhardt report finding a set of polygon-shaped tiles-decagon, pentagon, diamond, bowtie and hexagon-that were arranged into distinctive patterns found on major Islamic buildings from the 12th through 15th centuries.
