Making Light:  Open thread 129 ::: September 14, 2009, 01:03 PM

Bruce Cohen @ 604:

Please disregard my response at #608.  I certainly should have
considered that the news was supposed to be surprising, and so counter
to prevailing belief (at least, prevailing up to four years ago).  In
or out of context, though, I believe my response was arrogant and rude
to you, and I deeply regret it.  I once again resolve not to act that
way in the future.

I've looked at the article (which is now up on the Saudi Aramco World
site) and the Science article on which it is based, and I am quite
astonished to see that some 12-15th century artisans apparently
developed the concept of hierarchical tiling (as described in
Wikipedia under "Aperiodic tiling").

As far as I can tell, these tiling methods actually do fall short of
being aperiodic, in that there is no development of local adjacency
constraints to enforce the hierarchical structure of the tiling.
However, the use of hierarchical tiling is itself quite amazing.
Thank you for bringing this to the fluorosphere.