APPLICATIONS OF TRANSFORMATIONS

Transformations play a huge role in human’s daily life, but most of its uses or
benefits didn’t really get into the view of people. Transformations are more commonly
known to be one of the must-learn subject in schools rather than being recognized as
one of mathematics branch of creation that gave lots of advantages and new findings
for human to access. These are two examples of transformations that we had chosen
and the reasons for us to have said so.

Tessellation is a small part of transformations that is widely used by human and

is considered as important to human kind. Why? For example, if you want to designed
your house’s large surface (such as floor) with little pieces of material, you would
absolutely go for a designed that repeats itself since repeating patterns are usually
more beautiful and neat-looking than a haphazard non-repeating one. As soon as you
are finished, you would have designed a tessellation. Any repeating patterns of shapes
that cover a plane without overlapping against each other are considered as
tessellation. Both ancient and modern cultures are related to tessellations since the
starting of their era.

Tessellations are thousands years old and can be found all over the world in a
variety of cultures and forms. The origins of tessellations can be traced all the way back
to the Sumerian civilization which was about 4000 B.C... The walls of homes and
temples were decorated by designs of tessellations constructed from slabs of hardened
clay. Apart from providing designed and patterns for the buildings, they also became
part of the structure itself. Since then, tessellations have been found in many of the
artistic elements of wide-ranging cultures around the world.

A tessellation is a repeating pattern composed of interlocking shapes, usually

polygons that can be extended infinitely. The tiling of regular or periodic tessellation is
done with one repeated congruent regular polygon covering a plane in a repeating
pattern without any openings or overlaps. A semi-regular tessellations, or also known as

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non-periodic tessellation is formed by a regular arrangement of polygons, identically
arranged at every vertex point.

Probably the best known tessellations work of art would be the Alhambra palace,
an Islamic architectural marvel located in Granada, Spain. Its floors, walls and ceilings
are literally covered with tessellations and other repeating patterns. In recent times,
tessellations have appeared on walls, floors, ceilings and buildings other than in
ceramics, clothing designs, rugs, wallpapers and stained-glass windows. They have
continued to be an art piece for artists such as Maurits Escher, Victor Vasarely and
Bridget Riley who have explored variations and extensions of tessellations on the plane.

Another example of applications of transformations in daily life, considering them

to be mankind, would be of the enlargement. Enlargement is the act or process of
making something larger or in other word, expanding it, according to the scale. For
example, the creation of models of building. Human created the models in small sizes
so that it would be easier for them to inspect all its aspects to ensure the safety and the
suitability of it before emerging it into the real one. They use scale to differentiate and to
ensure that everything about the enlarged image would be the same as its object. The
image and the object will be same but not congruent. This is due to the difference in its
size although the shape and its direction is the same.

For an instance, the scientists wanted to build a newly designed spaceship so

that they can explore more about outer space. They can’t simply build the spaceship
into its real size as it will be hard for them to make any adjustments if necessary apart
from it would cost a fortune to do so. To solve these problems, they would build a model
that resembles the spaceship they decided to build, but it would be of different size.
From the model, they would make all the adjustments needed and when they are sure
of its safety, they would build the real spaceship based on the model but with its size
enlarged to a certain scale. Usually for this type of situations, which involves real life
problems, the scale factor of the enlargement process are much bigger that the scale
factor we usually used in ordinary computations.

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 The real spaceship build is the image of the enlargement of its object, which is
the model of the spaceship. Same thing goes for other problems. Before an architect
can build a real house, they would have to observe the model of the building first, make
sure of the safety and its structure, and then will they start with the real project. This is
so important when it comes to making a model and enlarging it to become a real one as
it can help in enhancing a certain parts of its models and solving some problems that
might occurs before making it into a real one as this can help curb any possibilities for
problems to occur in the future. It gave a basic view of how a thing would turn out to be
before carrying it out.