Girih Tiles and Quasicrystals in Medieval Islamic Architecture
Lu's most widely-publicized work involves his discovery of the girih tiles, a set of fundamental geometric tiles used to create a wide range of patterns in medieval Islamic architecture. In collaboration with Paul Steinhardt, he demonstrated their use to create quasicrystal tilings on the walls of Darb-i Imam shrine (1453 A.D.) in Isfahan, Iran. The finding was considered a significant breakthrough by demonstrating a simple and straightforward method that could have been used by common workers to create extremely complicated patterns using girih tiles, and by identifying a medieval example of quasicrystalline patterns, which were not widely known to or understood by the West until the discovery of Penrose tilings by Roger Penrose in the 1970s. For its timely scientific and political implications, Lu and Steinhardt's work on medieval Islamic architectural tilings received substantial worldwide coverage on the front pages of a number of major newspapers, on the radio, and in magazines; the finding was identified as among the top 100 scientific discoveries of 2007 by Discover magazine.
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