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Muslim artists were 500 years ahead of western researchers.
The complex geometrical designs used centuries ago in Islamic art and architecture were planned with a tiling system that was not discovered in the West until five centuries later, two physicists have claimed.
Read more here.
Posted by Nicola Jones on February 22, 2007
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Most of us with an education are already aware of the glories the old Islamic Empire achieved. None can argue this.
Sadly, what they did has not much to do with what they do now. So many fundamentalists would have frozen that culture and continue to try. They had a much more open and accepting culture then. Persia was great. The Ottoman Empire was great. There is nothing to crow about now. There is hope. Take power from the preachers. That is their only hope.
Posted by: Blane Burns | February 22, 2007 09:18 PM
What a load of garbage. To say that Muslims understood the math behind these silly doodles is equivalent to saying the a dog understands physics, aerodynamics and calculus if it can catch a ball.
Posted by: Jon Carry | February 22, 2007 09:58 PM
Scientifically and mathematically, islam was much ahead of it's time. A large number of discoveries by scientists in last 30 years were in the domain of islam many hundreds of years ago. The Quran itself contains many facts which could have not been known at the time islam was revealed.
Islam has contributed vast amounts to modern modern science. A good resource for science and islam is:
http://www.1001inventions.com
Posted by: Shu | February 23, 2007 05:28 PM
regarding Jon Carry's comment--it seems he suffers from a severe case of the Myth of Westernness---his analogy shows more about his myopia than the state of knowledge available to Muslims.
As regard comment by Blane Burns: the kind of educated people he is talking about are as rare as Saladins. Does he not know about the reactionaries in America who do not want Darwin mentioned in schools.
Stop blaming Muslims for being closeminded without mentioning the role played by Western powers to keep them that way.
9/11 was a case of chickens hatched by 75 years of American foreign policy coming home to roost and Islamo fascists are the end result of more than a thousand years of deliberate lies and demonization of Muslims.
British went out of their way when they controlled the world to promote the worst elements of the Muslim societies. Americans did the same when they used the Afghans to fight Soviet Union. The "Preachers" would not have gotten their chance if the Anglo Americans had not overthrown a demoncratically elected government in Iran back in 1953.
A good way to deal with radical Muslims is by undoing the damage done by more than a thousand years of lies and distortations by Europeans. It is time for Europeans to acknowledge that their civilization did not arrive one morning Barbie Bosomed and ready to ovulate--it was built on what Muslims had brought. without paper which Muslims made a household presence, there would have been no Gutenburg. It is Muslims who brought Cotton, Coffee, Candy, Chemistry, College, Check, Common-law, and courtly love to Europe--perhaps a bit of gratitude is in order.
Posted by: Athar Murtuza | February 23, 2007 10:43 PM
Why aren't there any records of this achievement written by the Moslems themselves? They wrote on astronomy, on religion, on history, on alchemy but not this headline grabing news item!
Buckminsterfuller came up with; as well as others, mathematical formulas for geometrical shapes. Where are the formulas the Moslems used to create this art work?
Could it be that one artisan got lucky in this pursuit, there after all succeeding artisans followed lockstepped?
Posted by: George Washington | February 24, 2007 04:26 PM
I totally disagree with the previous comments. While I do not still connote them as discriminatory, and I am neither a Muslim, I find it frivolous to claim that such finding is not true. A reverse process as it seems, science proves one by one that some of the the teachings in Quran are true. Whether the very society and culture created by such ancient feats remain as technology stalwarts is another story to tell. Readers are encouraged to do a little dig first before posting such reckless positions.
Posted by: Caezar Angelito Estioko Arceo | February 26, 2007 02:27 AM
For sure the western culture has a debt towards arabic one. That words like algebra, algorythm and zero came from that language is not by chance. But to tell the whole story, Muslims has their debts toward Greeks philosophers an Indians mathematicians. No people in human kind has the exclusive of intelligence and, unfortunaltly not of cultural myopia as well, as the burning of Alexandria Library should remember us. Maybe is time to start to think as members of the same humankind rather than of specific cultural subsets.
Posted by: Bruna Pelucchi | February 26, 2007 06:36 PM
Regarding the patterning that seemed to avoid repitition. I believe it may have been because Islamic artists regarded Allah as the only one perfect, therefore what man made should be imperfect with deliberate mistakes inserted at least once. In this case the patterning may have been intended to look imperfect by using the quasi-crystalline forms. The question remains though whether the Greeks, from whom Islamic mathematics borrowed heavily from, had discovered the theoretical principle first(see Archimedes Palimpset). You have to remember that it was the Bedouin Arabs that were influenced by Hellenic thought.
Posted by: woody wobblestick | February 26, 2007 08:54 PM
I noticed that an Iranian scientist was key in the development of laser physics, and is referred to as such in a Bell Labs brief on the invention of the laser. While he was not the credited inventor and did not receive a Nobel for this work, suggesting that people can't invent or apply things in other cultures is mistaken. If that were the case, America would be the leader in cell phone technology and usage, but it is famously not.
Posted by: michael addicott | February 26, 2007 09:41 PM
Clearly my eyesight is a bit off. Isn't the pattern a simple left:right reflection? I fully appreciate woody wobblestick's comment about Islamic avoidance of the perfect: where is it here?
Posted by: Mike Swanton | February 28, 2007 01:17 AM
I think it is pretty evident how the world is and for those concerned why it is? I think that little of what has been said here will go far in fixing it. Mankind has always been amazing, life began in the Middle East, history tends to be circular. Perhaps this should be cause for more than hope.
Posted by: Rena Gilbert | March 6, 2007 02:21 AM
Hello everybody: The usage/understanding of geometry in the Islamic world (read Arabic) is also evident by an interpretation that an earlier written form of the Arabic numbers 0-9 is based on angles. See http://www.orthohelp.com/number.htm
Posted by: Srijit Mishra | March 12, 2007 09:01 AM
Regarding the comment about documentation of patterns in the islamic world- if it is true that there is not much written within muslim culture on pattern making, perhaps it is due to the fact that they might have been considered guild secrets. Artisans in these societies were trained in guild structures since youth. Part of their education would have been the initiation into the trade secrets.
See André Paccard's excellent work "traditional Islamic Craft in Moroccan Architecture." The pictures of workers tell a story.
To see images taken from the Topkapi scroll go to the following site:
http://www.ee.bilkent.edu.tr/~history/geometry.html
Please notice the 11th image down as it shows both a 10-fold geometric star pattern and the underlying grid structure used to generate it. There are also drawings used to generate vaulting systems and some funky ones of sound patterns?
Posted by: nathan voirol | March 22, 2007 05:25 AM
All scientific discoveries are products of the reasoning mind and the scientific method based upon researches, religions have nothing to do with them. Religions work where science is still not able to give exlanations. Nations translate, copy, exchange and learn from each other. Arabs used to send their scientists to learn from other nations, translate books of Greeks, Persians, Indians and Chinese. let us look toward a brilliant future instead of comparing our little achievements of the past and relating them selfishly to religion.
Posted by: Nasif Masad | June 6, 2007 05:21 PM