Talk:Mosely snowflake

Attribution / priority?

FYI ... I came up with the "cube" snowflake fractals in Spring/Summer 2010 while working on a book on fractal geometry and design. The book was published in January 2011: the "solid" snowflake is shown on page 21 (8 of 27 cubelets removed), and a more extreme "hollow-centred" edge-connected version with "snowflake" and "Sierpinski carpet" profiles (15 of 27 cubelets removed) is shown on pages 62-64. Previews of these pages would probably have appeared on Google Books at about the same time as the book launch.

A while after the book came out, I blogged about the solid variant, and about an intermediate version (9 of 27 cubelets removed) along with photos of their 3D-printed models:

• http://alt-fractals.blogspot.com/2011/04/impossible-snowflake.html – April 2011 (solid version)
• http://alt-fractals.blogspot.com/2011/05/koch-snowflake-sponge.html – May 2011 (hollow version)

Those are the two snowflake versions currently shown on this WP page.

So there's actually three variants: (1) the "chunky" version with the solid centre, and (2) the version with the eight corners and one central cube removed (both face-connected, and easy to 3D-print), and (3) the version that also has the middle cube for each face removed, and where the remaining twelve sub-cubes are only connected by their edges.

Sometimes different people genuinely discover the same things simultaneously. I don't know Moseley's timeline for the discovery, I've contacted one of her associates for elaboration.

If Mosely's work is subsequent, she still gets credit for publicly promoting the shapes and devising a system that allows people to make them easily.

Since I have an obvious conflict of interest with respect to any editing of this page, I've limited myself to just adding the book reference (which seems fair, as it's currently the earliest known appearance of the shape), and have left the rest of the article as-is. ErkDemon (talk) 18:29, 4 June 2018 (UTC)