Faith and mathematics

IN 1079 AD, Omar Khayyam calculated the length of the year to be 365.24219858156 days,
astonishingly accurate to the sixth decimal, an inaccuracy of a fraction of a second of the true
length calculated in the 20th century using atomic clocks, computers and the Hubble
telescope. Yet, more than 900 years later, some of the greatest academic works chronicling
the contributions of Muslims to science, mathematics, society, law, and the arts have been
carried out by non-Muslims.
Most Muslims admire Islamic art. However, it was only recently that a young physicist made a
discovery that many of the beautiful patterns in ancient mosques were based on complex
mathematics thought to have been first developed in the mid-1970s.
In 2005, a Harvard doctoral student Peter Lu, was visiting Uzbekistan. He noticed the intricate
patterns in some historic mosques. Lu recognised the tiling’s patterns which were known by
mathematicians as Penrose Tiles. At first, he could not believe that the tiling was 500 years old
since he knew that the mathematics behind these was believed to have been first developed in
1974 by the distinguished Oxford mathematician and physicist, Roger Penrose.
After returning to Harvard, Lu collaborated with a world-renowned Princeton physicist Paul
Steinhardt, who in 1984 had proposed the existence of three-dimensional analogs of Penrose
Tiles, shrunk to the atomic level. Steinhardt had named such structures ‘quasi-crystals’. After
meticulously reviewing historic Islamic mosaics and manuscripts, they published a paper in
February 2007 in Science, a journal published by American Academy for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) in which they showed that Muslim mathematicians had made the geometric
breakthrough behind Penrose Tiles about 500 years before Penrose did. They wrote in their
paper, “....by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar
transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries
before their discovery in the West”.
Previously, Muslims treated learning as an act of faith.
Tessellations are repeating patterns made of one or more shapes without gaps or overlaps.
They generally tend to be tilings in which patterns are repeated (‘periodic’), meaning one can
easily predict the next pattern. It was well known that surfaces could be tiled with tiles with
three, four or six sides but not with only five-sided tiles.
Penrose had shown that it was possible to build geometric patterns using a small set of tile
shapes that may have both fivefold rotational symmetry, ie shapes that look the same if turned
one-fifth of a circle such as a five-pointed star, and reflectional symmetry, ie shapes whose
reflection is the same as the pattern. Penrose Tiles can also form a non-repeating (‘aperiodic’)
pattern. Regardless of how long one walks on tiles with aperiodic patterns, the next pattern
cannot be predicted.
In 1982, Daniel Shechtman, a scientist at the US National Bureau of Standards announced that
he had discovered a crystal whose patterns at the atomic level seemed to show fivefold
symmetry similar to Penrose Tiles and its pattern was non-repetitive. However, at that time,
scientists had assumed that arrangement of atoms in a crystal must have a repetitive pattern.
After announcing his discovery of crystals against the established scientific belief, Shechtman
was asked to leave his position. Nevertheless, he was able to publish his paper in 1984.
In 1987, Shechtman’s discovery was verified by scientists using X-rays. He was awarded the
2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The announcement of his Nobel Prize, said, “Aperiodic mosaics,
such as those found in the mediaeval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the
Darb-i-Imam Shrine in Iran, have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at
the atomic level”.
Muslims in Islam’s golden age knew that a surface cannot be tiled with just five-sided tiles. Why
then were they not content with designing elegant patterns using tiles with three, four or six
sides whose patterns are periodic, that is, whose next patterns are predictable? Why was it
important for them to use complex mathematics for tilings with fivefold symmetry and which
were aperiodic, ie their next pattern could not be predicted? Perhaps, to them, fivefold
symmetry represented Islam’s five pillars of faith and the five daily prayers. And, perhaps
aperiodic tiling represented human beings’ limited ability, or even an inability, to predict the
future which was in the realm of God.
Designing tiles which were in harmony with their faith was imperative, even if it required the
use of complex mathematics. It was possible in that era because two-thirds of the world’s most
renowned mathematicians who lived between 650AD and 1300AD were Muslims. Such
symbiosis between faith and learning existed for centuries when Muslims treated learning as an
act of faith.