Ancient Web: Stony Brook Turns Ancient Mazes Into Mathematics

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A labyrinth can be a religious symbol, a drawing exercise, an architectural pattern, or a string of numbers.

Visit Tony Phillips' maze mathematics page

The Stony Brook page takes familiar historical labyrinths and strips them down to structure.

It compares the Cretan maze with the Jericho maze found in medieval Hebrew manuscripts, then defines a class called simple, alternating, transit mazes.

The terminology sounds dry until the diagrams make it obvious.

A maze as a level sequence

"Transit" means the path runs from the outside to the center without branches. "Alternating" means the path changes direction when it changes levels. "Simple" means it essentially circles each level once.

Once those conditions are met, a maze can be represented by the sequence of levels visited.

The page gives the Cretan pattern as 032147658 and the Jericho pattern as 03452167.

That is the lovely part: two ancient-looking drawings become objects that can be compared mathematically without caring about line thickness, decorative style, or the exact shape of the drawing.

The page also contrasts these with more complicated designs, including the Chartres-style labyrinth and a medieval plan of Constantinople, to show where the rules break.

The result is simultaneously historical and abstract. Archaeology and manuscript studies supply the examples; mathematics explains the family resemblance.

This is exactly the kind of page the old academic web was good at producing. A professor could publish a niche idea with diagrams, sequences, examples, and links without turning it into a journal article, a product, or a content campaign.

This one answers a great one:

What, mathematically, makes two labyrinths the same kind of labyrinth?

Return to the Stony Brook maze page

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.