Talk:Girih tiles

Pronunciation

Can't find a reliable source for the English pronunciation of the word "girih." ar.wikipedia has it as جيرة (ʒiːri?) but this initial jim could be realised as ʒ or ɡ (possibly also dʒ but I'm not sure) depending on the dialect. Greg Ravn (talk) 03:18, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Egyptian Arabic would use a "g" sound for the Arabic letter ج, while most other dialects would use "j" (i.e. "dzh") or "zh" sounds. The "j" sound would usually be considered the most standard modern literary Arabic pronunciation, but if the word is most commonly spelled Girih in English, that's the spelling which should be used on Wikipedia... AnonMoos (talk) 15:29, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

This is a Persian word, not Arabic. In fact this is a famous art in Iran/Persian World (known as گره چینی Girih-chīnī / Gereh-chini) but not known much in Arab world AFAIK. The Arabicized form used in Arabic Wikipedia (ar:جيرة) is also wrong, it should be جره or كره. --Z 07:48, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Examples

Could we get some better images? I appreciate the examples given and the way they demonstrate what's going on mathematically with these tiles, but it would be quite educational to actually see them in real-world use, or even better computer renders that aren't colour-coded. I'm not up to snuff on acquiring images that don't violate any copyright restrictions. Interestingly, ar.wikipedia uses girih tiles as their background! Greg Ravn (talk) 03:18, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

If you follow the external links in the references, you will find better images. However they are copyrighted, so legally we cannot just put them into this article. Sorry. JRSpriggs (talk) 15:11, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Radians vs degrees

I don't know if Wikipedia has a house policy on the usage of degrees or radians; personally I think it would be made easier to understand it if we used radians, but I'm also aware that degrees are more widely accepted. If I was sure it was okay I'd have done it myself, but since I can neither confirm nor deny a general rule I thought it would be worth discussing first. Greg Ravn (talk) 03:18, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

As the article says "... all their angles are multiples of 36° (π/5).". Just divide the angles in degrees by 36 and you will get the number to multiply by (π/5) radians. JRSpriggs (talk) 15:15, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

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Topic of this article

This article, as its name says, is the tiles that are used for Girih. Other articles look at the patterns formed by girih. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:51, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

The term Girih tiles seems to have no general acceptance but is rather used by Lu and Steinhardt (2007) alone. Moreover it is not commonly used in research about Islamic architectural decoration but seems to be covered as a specific description of the mathematical term Penrose tiling. Therefore I doubt, that the article here is the best way to represent the matter. --ThT (talk) 09:04, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Jay Bonner's book

Jay Bonner's book Islamic Geometric Patterns from 2017 should not only be referenced in this article but have a whole sub topic, as it evolves the initial 5-piece Girih tile set coined by Lu and Steinhart. What do you think? Have anyone read it? I'm not sure I can do it justice so I ask for someone else to do a better job? Rixn99 (talk) 10:56, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Careful. If we were to write about that book, discussing its thesis, we'd need a reliable source that discusses the book, i.e. a book or technical review article by a third party, or better several of those. In the absence of those things, we can do very little beyond citing the book and mentioning that it has a thesis; it would be WP:OR for any editor to say whether that thesis is good or bad, advances the art, or whatever. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:50, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

I understand, it needs to be verified by other people's publications as a viable source of reference that this is actually evolving the subject further. Whenever I read published papers since then, pretty much everyone have at least one reference to Bonner's book, as do the paper by Lu and Steinhardt.

All papers use Bonner's book as a thorough coverage of this tiling method (refered to as "polygons-in-contact" by Hankin and "polygonal technique" by Bonner. Most publications in the subject have been short papers, and Bonner's book is the only real book that explains the practise. There are a lot of books about Islamic Geometric Patterns (IGP) but they don't cover this technique to replicate the IGPs.

Actually, Bonner himself is a bit angry over the fact that Lu and Steinhardt got so much respons for their paper from 2007, when Bonner's paper about this method came out four years earlier. His book is the core of this research field. Unfortunately I haven't found so many reviews that brings this fact to light. I'll keep looking. Rixn99 (talk) 19:53, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Overlap with Girih page

Girih is very similar. Not sure why both pages exist. scruss (talk) 13:58, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

True, as this article stands, it is very similar.

I argue for a revision of this topic, as it doesn't properly describes what Girih tiles is. There are too much about Girih patterns. As I understand the phrase "Girih tiles" was coined by Lu and Steinhart in their 2007 paper, in which they also argued for some controversial claims that the old masters, not only, knew about tiling/polygon-in-contact/polygonal method, they also knew about periodicity. As these claims are highly disputed, the reluctance of using the term "girih tiles" is understandable, but nevertheless the term has been a key to popularize this technique. Unfortunately the topic isn't talking about this.

In the topic Girih (which talks about Girih patterns) there is a section about Girih Tiles (with a link here), but just above there is a section about Hankin's "polygon in contact" concept (or technique), which the Girih tiles is a part of (not mentioned there). Here Hankin's concept isn't even mentioned, actually the polygon-in-contact method doesn't have a topic by itself.

This section should definitely be improved by a restructuring with a starting point in Hankin's method, as well as Bonner's extensive work, for what he refers to as "the polygonal technique, both highly referenced in papers on the subject.

The Five tiles section is just one tile set to form Girih pattern. It shouldn't be defined as the only tile set. Furthermore, we have a situation where the text refer to tiles in two ways, where the meaning of "tile" in the header refers to the puzzle piece that carry the motif (which sometimes is referred to as the "prototile"), and then we have the "tile" meaning in "the quadrilateral tile called Torange". The latter is the conventional meaning of the word "tile" within this context. We also have the use of the word "module", which describes the "prototile" but used in the conventional context. This makes things very mixed up.

So to get back to your comment - this section should definitely exist as the concept of Girih Tiles is very separate from the meaning of Girih. Girih pattern is a thing, but Girih tiles is a new popularized phrase that might not fit the academic concept of what's going on. As I see it, we need to have three topics:

• The one about Girih pattern called "Girih" (the existing one),
• One about "polygons in contact" (tiling/polygonal technique), and
• One topic about Girih tiles which only should be about Lu and Steinhart's discovery about the quasiperiodicity of Islamic geometric patterns and possible about the controversial claim. (There are several publications that cover this.) Their coining of the term Girih tiles should only be a subordinate clause (as has been done in the topic of Islamic_geometric_patterns#In_Western_culture (where Bonner also is mentioned).

The traditional techniques to create Islamic geometric pattern should be mentioned and linked to. Unfortunately there are no topic that cover this. It should be such a page (and preferably linked from the above mentioned topic about Islamic geometric patterns), as it is a subject very much unknown, due to the tradition of old masters of keeping it a trade secret. But there are papers published about this so it shouldn't be impossible to create it, especially since we are seeing new techniques (by compasses and straightedge) evolve (like the Ring Count Method, which haven't yet been properly published academically yet).Rixn99 (talk) 18:46, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Persian names of tiles

In this edit I've moved the Persian names of each tile into the bulleted list. However, there were two inconsistencies before, and I have not consulted the source, so I may have made it worse:

• Shesh Band was described as concave hexagonal, but as Sormeh Dan was described as bow tie, Shesh Band must be the convex hexagram (unless it's the other way round!)
• Tabl was described as decagram, which actually means a 10-pointed star (a concave icosagon); Tabl must in fact be the decagon.

Girih tiles

Both inconsistencies may have to do with a confusion between the outlines of the tiles (black in figure; a.k.a. construction lines), and the interior lines (blue; girih pattern): The pattern on the decagon is a decagram, and the pattern on the convex hexagram is bowtie-like. So, perhaps tabl really does refer to a decagram. If so, I think the whole section should be rewritten to make the distinction between pattern and outline clear. My preference would be to present the information in a table, rather than a bullleted list, with columns like

The five tiles

Shape of tile outline	Shape of tile pattern	Persian name of pattern
regular decagon with ten interior angles of 144°	decagram (10-pointed star)	Tabl

etc. But I think the contribution of an expert (or someone with access to the source) is required.

Sign above post, and edit text slightly to clarify.--Nø (talk) 10:44, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Two decagon patterns?

The article says:

However, the decagon has two possible girih patterns one of which has only fivefold rather than tenfold rotational symmetry.

No source, I think, and no indication what the other pattern looks like. ?? Nø (talk) 08:52, 3 February 2023 (UTC)