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Saturday, 19 February 2011

I built a new bookcase in our home. That means that, as soon as the paint is dry, i can now put all my books in one place where i can easily find them, on alphabetical order. I think it was at least ten years ago that the books had such a place.

Ten years ago i had a plan to write a book about the subjects of my interest. It would be about western esoteric models, like that of Gurdijeff, Colin Wilson, Blavatsky, Steiner and especially the less known pioneers of the esoteric world. But then so many books came out on these subjects that i lost interest in writing one myself. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. I still have piles of text that i have written back then, but i would find it very hard work to edit that into a readable manuscript.
Many books were only kept because i wanted to write about them, which is not going to happen, but so far i have not been able to do much booksaway. These books are very dear to me, even when i don’t believe anylonger much of what is written in them, and even when i would never re-read some of these books. Most of the books that i read i would never want to keep. The 12 meters of books that are going to be in the new bookcase is a carefully selected collection. But there are always new books coming to me that i cannot do away. Recently these books were added to my collection:

Both books were given to me by Frans de Jong. The freaks book is interesting, but added little information than i already had. But the book about tiling is fascinating. Tiling is actually a form of mathematics. I first read about it in a book by Roger Penrose. From Wikipedia: “A Penrose tiling is a non-periodic tiling generated by an aperiodic set of prototiles named after Sir Roger Penrose, who investigated these sets in the 1970s. Because all tilings obtained with the Penrose tiles are non-periodic, Penrose tiles are considered aperiodic tiles.” (Here!)
The book by Grunbaum & Shephard contains 700 pages of illustrations and explanations about tiling & patterns that all look more or less like this:

I am not good enough at mathematics to be able to read more than half of this book. But that is enough to get a glimpse of the mysteries involved in this branch of mathematics. Roger Penrose came up with the (so far unanswered, if i am correct) question if it is possible to do a non-periodic tiling with one tile. And if so, what would such a tile look like?

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