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Now a Harvard University researcher argues that more than 500 years ago, math whizzes met up with the artists and began creating far more complex tile patterns that culminated in what mathematicians today call "quasi-crystalline designs."

Quasi-crystal patterns weren't demonstrated in the West until the 1970s.

"It shows us a culture that we often don't credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought," contends Harvard graduate student Peter J. Lu, who studied the question after a vacation in Uzbekistan left him marvelling at the tilework.

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that were arranged into distinctive patterns found on major Islamic buildings from the 12th through 15th centuries.

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Apperently, if you continue the pattern outwards for infinity, it will never repeat itself.

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Only in the 1970s did British mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry.

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If they were really using complex geometry, it would have been spectacularly impressive, and possibly one of the master finds of the year.

[ 23 February 2007: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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"It shows us a culture that we often don't credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought,"

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Humans have the tendancy to think our progression has been completely linear, always moving forward (added, let me restate... Western cultures is more accurate. There are many humans in this world that view time progressing up to down instead of left to right, so 'time moving forward' isn't true for all humans ^^)... Unfortuantely it can't be farther from the truth, the dark ages and a few other events (man-mand and natural) set us back a wayson more than one occasion. Somehow it's exceedingly hard to consider that we could have at one point been more advanced in a discipline than we are now.

Much of Islam went unaffected by the darkages, atleast before the dark ages were exported in the form of crusades... The same mathematics that were rediscovered in the renaissance period were very much alive in the Muslim world at that time.

The flat earth is also a throw back of our knowlege as well, several cultures prior to greece knew the world was round... But information can devolve. Heck, we're still seeing a drive to devolve to to this very day (dinosaurs were alive in what century now? )

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Intriguing nonetheless. Medival Muslims developed Algebra (Al-jabr) and trigonometry.

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Rediscovered, yes... devloped, not quite. Unless you feel like putting together a case that the Egyptians were unaware of Trig.

[ 23 February 2007: Message edited by: Noise ]