page_title: Mathematics and architecture
section_title: Islamic architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Mathematics and architecture / Religious principles / Islamic architecture
caption_attribution_description: Selimiye...
context_page_description: Mathematics and architecture are related, since, as with other arts, architects use mathematics for several reasons. Apart from the mathematics needed when engineering buildings, architects use geometry: to define the spatial form of a building; from the Pythagoreans of the sixth century BC onwards, to create forms considered harmonious, and thus to lay out buildings and their surroundings according to mathematical, aesthetic and sometimes religious principles; to decorate buildings with mathematical objects such as tessellations; and to meet environmental goals, such as to minimise wind speeds around the bases of tall buildings.
  In ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, India, and the Islamic world, buildings including pyramids, temples, mosques, palaces and mausoleums were laid out with specific proportions for religious reasons. In Islamic architecture, geometric shapes and geometric tiling patterns are used to decorate buildings, both inside and outside. Some Hindu temples have a fractal-like structure where parts resemble the whole, conveying a message about the infinite in Hindu cosmology.
context_section_description: The historian of Islamic art Antonio Fernandez-Puertas suggests that the Alhambra, like the Great Mosque of Cordoba, was designed using the Hispano-Muslim foot or codo of about 0.62 metres (2.0 ft). In the palace's Court of the Lions, the proportions follow a series of surds. A rectangle with sides 1 and √2 has (by Pythagoras's theorem) a diagonal of √3, which describes the right triangle made by the sides of the court; the series continues with √4 (giving a 1:2 ratio), √5 and so on. The decorative patterns are similarly proportioned, √2 generating squares inside circles and eight-pointed stars, √3 generating six-pointed stars. There is no evidence to support earlier claims that the golden ratio was used in the Alhambra. The Court of the Lions is bracketed by the Hall of Two Sisters and the Hall of the Abencerrajes; a regular hexagon can be drawn from the centres of these two halls and the four inside corners of the Court of the Lions.
  The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey, was built by Mimar Sinan to provide a space where the mihrab could be see from anywhere inside the building. The very large central space is accordingly arranged as an octagon, formed by eight enormous pillars, and capped by a circular dome of 31.25 metres (102.5 ft) diameter and 43 metres (141 ft) high. The octagon is formed into a square with four semidomes, and externally by four exceptionally tall minarets, 83 metres (272 ft) tall. The building's plan is thus a circle, inside an octagon, inside a square.
caption: Selimiye Mosque, Edirne, 1569–1575
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