Haemoglobin 8.26, Festival Pattern Group silk tie fabric (1950/1951) by Vanners Silk Weavers and George ReynoldsScience Museum
A pattern is a regularly repeated arrangement,
such as a design in which lines, shapes, or colours repeat. Spotting a pattern is not only pleasing in itself: it can also lead us to ask interesting questions about how and why the pattern happened, which can help us make calculations and solve problems.
Brewster's Patent Kaleidoscope (1815/1825) by Philip CarpenterScience Museum
Patterns that delight
Kaleidoscopes like this ‘Brewster’s patent’ version have been popular toys since the early 1800s. Colourful beads tumble inside the tube. Small mirrors set at angles repeat the image of the beads to make beautiful symmetrical patterns.
Picture illustrating the use of computers in experimental mathematics (1985/1985) by Praxis plc and Benoît MandelbrotScience Museum
Experimenting with patterns
A pattern that is repeated at every scale - big or small - is called a ’fractal’. It could be as tiny as the top of a pin or bigger than a planet and still look the same. Artist Benoît Mandelbrot created the word ‘fractal’ in 1975 to describe the phenomenon.
IBM Model 4860 PCjr personal computer (1978/1988) by IBMScience Museum
Mathematics has predicted patterns like this for hundreds of years, but it was only when personal computers were widely available that we could actually see what they looked like.
Festival of Britain patterns by Festival Pattern GroupScience Museum
Making patterns fashionable
These patterns may look random but they came from the microscopic world, in this case the shapes of molecular structures. Clockwise from top left: mica (yellow), haemoglobin (blue), insulin (pink) and china clay (turquoise).
The shapes of the molecular structures are influenced
by the properties of the tiny particles (atoms, ions and molecules) that make them up. The particles arrange themselves very neatly, making them easy to measure, and each pattern is different. Which is why they make such interesting fabrics!
Alphabets for instruction in Braille and Morse codeScience Museum
Using patterns to communicate
Some patterns can be decoded with our fingers. Braille is a system of raised dots that allows people to read with their sense of touch. The wooden teaching letters shown here allow people to feel the shapes of standard alphabet letters and each letter’s unique Braille pattern.
'Friendly Floatee' plastic duck (1990-1992)Science Museum
Toys that track patterns
In 1992 thousands of these Friendly Floatees bath toys fell off a ship in the North Pacific Ocean. They were found washed up all over the world, including in Hawaii, the continental United States, Ireland and Britain.
'The First Years' 'Friendly Floatee plastic duck (1990/1992) by Friendly FloateesScience Museum
Ocean researchers used the toys’ accidental journeys to learn about ocean drift patterns.
Guinevere, Random Number Selector (1994) by Camelot Group plcScience Museum
Avoiding patterns
It’s challenging to create a machine that selects random numbers, but Guinevere did exactly that. Guinevere was programmed to create sequences of numbers for the National Lottery that would be impossible to predict and difficult to guess.
Astronomy: from Herschel to Hubble set of Royal Mail stamps (2002) by Royal MailScience Museum
Patterns in our brains and the stars
Patterns exist at different scales all around us. For example, a close-up image of the neurons in our brain looks very similar to an image of all the different clusters of galaxies in the night sky, what we call the ‘cosmic web’.
(Fun fact: there are roughly the same number of neurons in the human brain as there are galaxies, at least in the universe we can see!)
China clay 8.6 pattern fabric (1951) by Old Bleach Linen Company and G W BrindleyScience Museum
Conclusion
Being able to recognise and predict patterns has had a huge effect on our lives, whether it’s to improve accessibility, monitor climate change or map the universe. What patterns might we discover in the future?
Science Museum is part of the Science Museum Group.
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