mathematics

After six nights in the dark, my power returned last night. I am immensely grateful that my house escaped the widespread devastation that can be found in my community. I've posted my photos of the devastation and its aftermath to Flickr; I did not seek out damage for photography purposes, but it was everywhere I went. it took a few days to rescue Tenzing from the vet's, thanks to this mess in front of their building:

['Lucky house, lucky vet']

As ideas go, this is a pretty insane one. I've been routing my creativity off in a few different directions while stumped on how to proceed with Adam's wedding quilt (sigh, hang head in shame, lather, rinse, repeat) and this direction has been stranger than most.

I've made no secret of my intention of doing a Penrose tiling quilt ('Pentatonic') later this year, and it has sent my brain in lots of new directions. It's caused me to look hard at Islamic tiling patterns, which meant I encountered more aperiodic tilings, and started looking at patterns that weren't based on the fours, sixes, eights, and nines of standard quilting.

A Penrose tiling is an aperiodic tiling consisting of only two tiles and containing five-fold symmetry. The wikipedia entry for Penrose tilings has good images and information about it, plus a couple of photos that help you see how the pattern might look when colored in.

I am aware of the existence of a few small Penrose quilts, but from examining the photos it looks like they contain at most three iterations of the tiling. Not surprising — it's hard to find images to work from that have more than three iterations. I had to install Inkscape and use the instructions on this page to render out seven iterations of the pattern, but it's in readiness for when I decide to tackle the pattern.

Like I needed a new obsession.

On Friday afternoon, Jacob introduced me to Penrose tilings, which were entirely new to me. I was completely fascinated, running off in a multitude of directions to learn about things like 'aperiodic tilings' and tile patterns in Islamic architecture, and by Saturday I was hooked.

“I’d noticed that when you were working with numbers you often wiggled your fingers.”

A very simple motion, that. Look away momentarily and it is easily missed: an arpeggio played from left pinky to left thumb, and occasionally even crossing over to the right hand. What am I doing?

I’m multiplying.