The Sierpinski Triangle
Sierpinski was a Polish mathematician who expressed in numbers the intricate, self-repeating patterns that occur when you split an equilateral triangle into smaller triangles using the midpoints of edges. As far as I know he was the first to show this mathematically, but he was nowhere near the first to express this visually.
Examples of Sierpinski triangles can be found in artwork such as tile mosaics hundreds of years old. When examining Indigenous art forms such as the Columbia River Form of the Pacific Northwest, the artwork is sometimes a thousand or more years old. This leads me to believe that knowledge, while often talked about as being “discovered”, is new only with respect to how it is expressed by us humans.
As mentioned in a previous post, my ability to talk about math is more than fairly limited, so I will stop here and encourage folks to look up this and other repeating patterns on their own.
Here endeth the lesson on the Sierpinski triangle.
Bike Newbie 