Master Mystic Maze Maths

This is maths fun without arithmetic, found in ancient games and puzzles, so that you need no knowledge of maths at all !

The ancient mazes have no apparent puzzle to solve. There was only one path - no branches or dead ends, no hedges or walls - but there was a sacred geometry concealed in the myths and patterns.

All mazes over six hundred years old were made by tricks: you used a simple set of rules to turn one pattern into another, and there was a choice of path. The rules could make thousands of patterns - each one with its own path. An ancient maze is not a puzzle waiting to be solved, it is the solution to a pattern-making puzzle!

It's great fun to make these patterns, and anyone can do it, but trained mathematicians might recognise deterministic chaos, fractals, combinatorics, symmetries, topological transforms, hyperspatial geometry, arcs, involutes and evolutes - features of modern mathematics created by man in prehistoric times. The ancient labyrinth puzzle is the earliest use of algorithms, and the "clue of twine" was a parallel computer which could calculate better than any electronic computer in the world today - yet sadly, the Ancient Greeks thought it absurd to try to learn anything mathematical from it...