Ethnomathematics

By all means, check Darrah Chavey's work in progress on the subject of "Cultural Approaches to Mathematics." As pointed out, "Many cultures throughout the world, and throughout history, use various styles of pattern repetition to create artwork, or to add artistic elements to their crafts and material culture."

The aim here is to understand the ways in which patterns vary across cultures. As a starting point, Darrah Chavey starts by trying to understand traditional Western patterns and then moves on to other cultures. Where patterns are not obvious, "hidden" symmetries are analyzed.

Like I said, this is a work in progress and Darrah will cover additional facets of the "Ethnomathematics" as this web page develops.

The pages of resources are arranged in two groups: by mathematical topic and by cultural region.

http://cs.beloit.edu/~chavey/M103/Symmetries.html