Lattice drawings

Tuesday 28 June 2005This is more than 19 years old. Be careful.

I recently unearthed evidence of my geeky teenager-hood: I made many Lattice Drawings on 1-mm graph paper. I’m still fascinated by them, so I guess it is also evidence of my geeky middle age...

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Comments

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Very nice and Escher-esque.

I can see the appeal both then and now.
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Looks like you were trying to solve the tromino tiling problem in the upper-left corner of the first scan. I'm curious as to whether you knew of the problem, or it was just a coincidence.

FWIW, a more comprehensive discussion of the problem is available here as a PowerPoint file.
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Patterns like these are traditionally drawn in India in courtyards outside a home. My mom still religiously draws it every morning outside our home.

It's called Rangoli, or Kolam in South India. They are usually drawn using a white powder, but special occasions call for particularly elaborate and colorful patterns.

http://www.i-kolam.com/
http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/art/rangoli.htm

Thanks for putting up scans of the graph paper -- it's cool that you still have it!

Would it be too much to ask if you could publish the python program you wrote for the computer-drawn images?

-K
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Brian: I wasn't trying to solve the tromino problem, I was interested in rep-tiles (http://math.wcupa.edu/~nitica/webreptiles/reptiles.html), whereby a number of similar tiles could be grouped together to make a larger version of the tile.

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