Art
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A beautiful example of maths hangs in the Tate Modern. The famous drip paintings of Jackson Pollock have lines of paint that seem to fill the canvas and, no matter how close you look, the painting appears the same: they have a fractal structure. Mathematical analysis has even been used to distinguish Pollock's genuine paintings from forgeries. Chaotic pendulums can mimic Pollock's physical method but we are yet to automate the innate aesthetic judgment of the artist's eye. -
No matter where you stand, the pattern in the pavement outside the student bar at Wadham College never repeats. This is because it is a Penrose tiling, named after the mathematician Roger Penrose who invented it in the 1970s. Penrose tilings not only have many interesting mathematical properties, they also explain the structure of some unusual metallic crystals, called quasicrystals, that were discovered in the 1980s and won Dan Shechtman the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011. -
The recently restored Leeds Tiled Hall cafe and the Central Library are stunning examples of Victorian architecture and tilings. The parquet floors, tiled walls, ceilings and staircases display amazing colourful tiling patterns made by using shapes like triangles, squares, hexagons, rectangles and octagons. But why were these particular shapes used to create the patterns? What is so special about them? How can you create your own tilings using these ones as stimuli? -
A beautiful walk around Segovia down town enjoying the sgraffiti on the different facades. Segovia is a city located in the geographical centre of Spain, renown for its Roman Aqueduct. It is a World Heritage Site since 1985. -
I noticed the golden ratio in the "Great Jaguar" temple in Tikal, Guatemala (700 a.d.) -
Test
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Gympie is 160km north of Brisbane, Queensland and is a historical town with many points of interest. At Wood Works, The Forestry and Timber Museum you will find a large timber sphere. The muesum is located a short drive north of Gympie.
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This rather lovely little bridge connects the University of Durham's campus in Stockton-on-Tees with... not much at the moment. But it's supposedly inspired by the symbol for infinity. -
The Bean, or “Cloud Gate” as it is officially known, was created by the artist Anish Kapoor for the city of Chicago and is modeled after a drop of mercury. It is 33-foot high, 66-foot wide and is made of approximately 110-tonnes of stainless steel. Like a fun-house mirror, it reflects the city and its observers in distorted shapes. -
In the underground corridors of Vienna's Karlsplatz U-bahn station, there are mirrored walls with many facts and figures on them. One of them is the definition of pi (in German) and the beginning of its decimal expansion, shown in another snapshot for this location. Around the corner, the digits on the mirror end, followed by '...', which is followed by a display that continues on showing blocks of digits that come later and later in the expansion. This snapshot shows a frame of that.
