Peter Lu

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Peter James Lu (born 1978 in Cleveland (Ohio), USA) is a physics student (PhD expected in 2007) at Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts.

Lu and Steinhardt have studied Islamic tiling patterns, called girih, which strongly resemble Penrose tilings, patterns discovered 1973 by the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose. In 1984, they were found in natural substances called quasicrystals that seemed to break the geometric rules of atomic packing. A girih design on the Darb-i-Imam shrine is closely related to a Penrose tiling. One of the pattern's mesmerizing features is that, like a true quasicrystal, it looks regular but never repeats. A similarity between Penrose tiling and decorative patterns used in the Middle East has been frequently noted and in February 2007 a paper by Steinhardt and Lu offered evidence that a Penrose tiling underlies some examples of Islamic medieval art^[1].

[edit] See also

• Paul Steinhardt
• Penrose tiling
• Aperiodic tiling
• Darb-i Imam
• Girih

[edit] Notes and References

1. ^ Peter J. Lu and Paul J. Steinhardt (2007). "Decagonal and Quasi-crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture". Science 315: 1106-1110. 

[edit] External links

• Peter Lu's home page [1]