Jay Kappraff

"Mosaic I: The Music of the genes I"

"Mosaic I: The Music of the genes II"

"Quilts by Elaine Ellison"

20" X 38", in progress

Jay Kappraff, Department of Mathematics, New Jersey Institute of Technology

These matrices specify the number of ways that the hydrogen bonds can interact within a DNA of RNA codon which is a triple of the four bases: C, A, G, U/T. There are 64 possible codons groups of which form the 20 amino acids. In the first mosaic the rows and columns are organized according to Gray Code (kappraff3) while in the second they are organized by binary (kappraff2). Sergei Petoukhov was the first person to see the significance of organizing the codons in this manner. I recognized that the numbers in this family of matrices represent the sequence of musical fifths as given by a matrix of numbers first derived by Nicomachus a Syrian mathematician from 150 A.D. Elaine Ellison has created a pair of quilts with these patterns