Inside Duke Medicine

Patterns Within Patterns

by Mark Schreiner

There’s something about the human mind that likes order, that loves patterns—loves seeing them, loves making them.

Patterns are everywhere.

Look around: There is the grid of the tiles, on the floor or the ceiling, that repeats down the corridor and around the corner into infinity—a pattern that covers space. There are the blocks of days on the wall calendar—a pattern that measures time.

Look at the weave of the fabric of which your shirt is made. The warp and weft of its threads make a pattern, too.

Nature’s doing it. In every cell are strands of DNA—its helical pattern setting out the instructions for life.

For the researcher, patterns are part of the job. There are the grids of data—an axis at the left and an axis on the top, and, between them, neat, regular cells filled with information.

Enter researcher and artist Jacqueline Rimmler.

She is fascinated by patterns. At work, the 20-year Duke employee is a clinical research analyst in the Duke Center for Human Genetics. Her job: performing statistical analysis on genetic data. She’s worked on projects seeking answers to the mysteries of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, muscular dystrophy and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Those conditions may be quite different, but Rimmler’s job is the same—looking for patterns in the data.

In her free hours, she makes art. Recently, she’s been on to something new.

“I’ve painted—oils and watercolors—and that was all right,” she said. “But then I looked at fabrics, at textiles, and something just happened for me.”

She took some second-hand fabric she picked up at the Scrap Exchange in downtown Durham, grabbed some scissors and began cutting.

She skillfully cut pieces into parallelograms, squares and triangles.

“I just like geometry,” she said. “I like pieces that fit together.”

What emerged were patterns—a mathematician would call them “tessellations”—with depth and texture.

Rimmler said she was inspired by the work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, whose famous illustrations examine, through images such as bird’s wings and fish scales, the mysterious intersection of nature, art and mathematics.

Rimmler’s art also fits together her values. She never makes the artwork but with recycled fabric—discarded textile sample books are rich sources, she said. When she sells a piece, she gives the proceeds to a charity.

“I like the idea that I can help keep fabric from going into landfills and create something beautiful as well,” she said. “And the money goes to charity—so I’m hoping to help out the world a little in that way, too.”

Tessellation Equation:

(a - 2)(b - 2) = 4

a = the average number of sides of a polygon
b = the average number of sides meeting at a vertex.