THE MATHEMATICAL CODE HIDDEN IN NATURE

 The living world is a universe of shapes and patterns; beautiful, complex, and sometimes strange
 Turing Pattern
o Alan turing
 Father or modern computer
 Movements of animals, population trends, evolutionary relationships, interactions between genes,
how diseases spreads: biological problems where mathematical models can help describe and
predict what we see in real life
 Mathematical biology
o Useful for describing things that we can’t see
o There are things in biology that we can’t observe
o Morphogenesis
 Delicate process of how living things grow and get their shape
 Generation of form
 The chemical basis of morphogenesis
 Describes how complex shapes form
 Reaction-diffusion reaction of morphogens
o Activator and inhibitor chemicals
o Spots and stripes; same reactions on different parts can create different patterns
o How are these patterns actually created in nature?

THE INFINITE PATTERN THAT NEVER REPEATS

 400yrs ago in Prague in Czech Republic

 Johannes Kepler
o Planetary are Elliptical
o Platonic Solids
 Objects where al the faces and vertices are identical
 Ex: cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron (12 pentagonal sides),
isocahedron (20 sides)
 How do you stack cannonballs so it takes up the least space on a ships deck
o Hexagonal close packing and face-centered cubic—Kepler’s Conjecture
 Why do snowflakes always have six sides?
 2, 3, 4, 6 symmetries (tile the plane periodically)
 Wang’s Conjecture=false hypothesis
 Aperiodic tiling
o Only tile the plane non-periodically
 Robinson Tiles
o 6 tiles that could tile the entire plane without repeating
 Roger penrose
o 2 tiles
 o Match up with Johannes kepler’s pattern
o Moire pattern- when you stack one penrose pattern on top of another
 Golden ratio appears on a penrose tiling (ratio of kites to darts)
 5 fold symmetry because there are 5 sets of parallel lines in a penrose tiling but it is not perfectly
regular because the gaps between the lines are not periodic and the ratio follow the Fibonacci
sequence and the ratio of one Fibonacci number to the previous one approaches the golden ratio
 Paul Steinhardt
o Use computers to model how atoms come together into condensed matter
o Found out that they like to form icosahedrons
 Quasicrystal
 Linus Pauling

What exists that we just can’t perceive because it is considered impossible?