Incidence and Symmetry in Design and Architecture

Book excerpt: The initial purposes of this 1983 text were to develop mathematical topics relevant to the study of the incidence and symmetry structures of geometrical objects and to expand the reader's geometric intuition. The two fundamental mathematical topics employed in this endeavor are graph theory and the theory of transformation groups. Part I, Incidence, starts with two sections on the basics of graph theory and continues with a variety of specific applications of graph theory. Following this, the text becomes more theoretical; here graph theory is used to study surfaces other than the plane and the sphere. Part II, Symmetry, starts with a section on rigid motions or symmetries of the plane, which is followed by another on the classification of planar patterns. Additionally, an overview of symmetry in three-dimensional space is provided, along with a reconciliation of graph theory and group theory in a study of enumeration problems in geometry.