Little Adventures

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I Discover Symmetry

The whole thing started 25 years ago. I was a student at Penn State, and just as I finished my last exams before Christmas, a tremendous snow storm dumped two feet of snow on my part of the world. I was sick to death of study and ready for a vacation, but the storm made travel impossible, so I cast about for something to do with my afternoon. I trudged through the still-blowing storm to the HUB, the student union building. My friends had left for home just before the storm started, so I found myself poking around in the book store there, more for something to do than with any real hope of finding anything that would interest me. As I wandered around in my damp snow gear, I chanced upon a book which was to change my life in a small sort of way. Called Altair Design, this import from England was nothing more than page after page of black symmetrical patterns on white paper. The idea was that you were to take colored markers and fill in the spaces between the lines to reveal any picture or design you saw in the patterns of lines. I paid my $1.95 for the book, bought some cheap markers, and settled down in the nearly empty student lounge to see what I could come up with.

I spent the whole of that quiet December afternoon making Altair designs. I began by coloring in spaces to make snakes, flowers and hot dogs. This was a lot like the game we all played as children, lying on our backs in the yard and finding castles in the clouds. Gradually I became interested in the symmetry of the patterns and started coloring whole pages in colorfully symmetric ways. After two or three hours of coloring tiny spaces, I had had enough. The sun was setting, and I was ready for a walk in the snow. And, as I shuffled along I now noticed symmetry in everything I saw, and I thought how the Altair designs had the same sorts of symmetry.

The patterns I had created were interesting to look at but they had required too much work to produce. What I thought I needed was some sort of a computer that would display the patterns on a TV screen and then let me color them by simply touching where I wanted to place a color. I had just finished a computer programming course and thought this would be a fine program to write when the right kind of computer came along. At that time though I was using punched cards and a printer connected to a large and very slow IBM mainframe computer. My little program would have to wait.

So I put Altair Design on my bookshelf that evening, and the next day went sliding home to Christmas over the newly plowed roads. I didn't know it at the time, but I had been infected by this little Altair interlude. From then on I was fascinated by all things symmetrical and collected any book that I came across on the subject. Spirographs, symmetric puzzles, kaleidoscopes, anything at all along these lines, if I could afford it, I bought it. Also back in some dim recess of my skull there was a part of me waiting for the right hardware to come along so that I could write my own program for doing Altair-like designs.