Ancient dragon fish, Rhinoceroses and Bird Rosettas: tessellations in laser cut wood

The art works proposed are examples of results of a yearly workshop for industrial design students at TU/e. The workshop serves to teach mathematical principles to design students. The students defined tessellations in turtle graphics using the new Oogway library for Processing and the classical tessellation theory of Heesch and Kienzle. Oogway is a happy marriage of turtle graphics and splines. But we do not stop at a digital representation of their tessellation design, we continue to cut their tessellations in perspex, wood, felt, adhesive plastic, felt and so on (using vector graphics output from Oogway). It moves the abstract concepts of math into the real world, so that the students can experience them directly, which provides a tremendous reward to the students. Before designing their own tessellations, the students got lessons on group theory, golden ratio and splines, next to inspirational lectures about Escher, fractals and Chinese symbiosis art.