You can either be mathematically minded or creatively minded, you can’t possibly be both, right?

Wrong.

Maths and art go hand in hand, they’re like apple and cinnamon or cheese and crackers.

Throughout school maths and art were always completely separate subjects, they took place in completely different parts of the school and even in primary school they were taught by different teachers. I could never have imagined them going together. That was until a very eye-opening input about their connections throughout time.

Artists have been using maths to create masterpieces for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Ancient Greeks used the Golden Ratio to ensure buildings and sculptures were pleasing to the eye. Renaissance painters used mathematical  to ensure facial features and body parts were in proportion and a lot of religious art in heavily mathematical with tessellation and geometric shapes featuring heavily.

Islamic art is possibly my favourite kind of mathematical art, so far… I think it’s eye catching and beautiful. Islamic art uses tessellation to create stunning images which paint the walls and ceilings of buildings.

Tessellation is the arrangement of shapes closely fitted together to create repetitive patterns. However, tessellation can not be done with any shape, it can only work if all of the angles of the shape add to make 360° such as squares, hexagons and equilateral triangles.