the Alhambra
Symmetry groups
Marcus du Sautoy calls the Alhambra ‘the palace of symmetry' and describes how he walks through the Alhambra with his son and a list of wallpaper groups. The people who decorated the 14th century weren’t aware of a theoretical concept of 17 possible groups but they managed to apply them all. Room after
room, wall after wall they surprize the visitor with just a new variation, establishing another pattern.
unit repeat
De Islamic decorators knew which regular forms to use to create tilings and used squares, rhombuses, parallelograms, triangles and hexagons as unit repeats. They created tilings using all kinds on transformations on this unit repeat.
GeoGebrabooks
I created some GeoGebrabooks in dutch on the Alhambra:
- symmetrie in het Alhambra
- behangpapiergroepen (wallpapergroups)
- Alhambra met passer, lineaal en GeoGebra
- Escher en het Alhambra