Mrs B has been making snowflakes as very effective window decorations. The process reminded me that symmetry is used a lot in physics to simplify problems. I came across the idea with tensors, where symmetry across the diagonal makes hideous calculations possible by eliminating a lot of possibilities.
Today I started with a square of paper.
I folded it into four.
This simplified things because I only needed to trim one quarter to make a whole circle.
I then folded it again.
Now I only needed to cut half shapes to get the effect I was looking for.
When opened the symmetry is revealed.
I tried again with a bigger piece of paper and twice as many folds.
I got twice as many patterns.
So using symmetry made it easy to make a very complex design, an analogue for physics computational short cuts.
