Patterns & Symmetry

A pattern is something that happens or appears in a regular and repeated way. A pattern can appear as a visible design, such as on some animals like snakes, zebra, cheetah, peacocks, etc.

Patterns can also appear as repeated events, such as in the weather or the behaviours of living things.

Many human-made patterns can be found in art and architecture. Visible human-made patterns often imitate natural patterns.

There are different types of patterns in mathematics, such as number patterns, image patterns, logical patterns, letter patterns, etc.

Number Pattern

 

Number patterns follow some particular rules. There are two types of number patterns.

• Increasing Pattern:In this pattern, the numbers are increasing by a particular order.
• Decreasing Pattern:In this pattern, the numbers are decreasing by a particular order.

Increasing Pattern:

a.By Addition:

Example:In 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 … where the pattern is increasing by adding 5.

b.By Multiplication:

Example:In 3, 9, 27, 54 … where the pattern is increasing by multiplying 3.

Decreasing Pattern:

1.By Subtraction:

Example:In 50, 45, 40, 35, 30, 25, 20, … the pattern is decreasing by subtracting 5 from previous number.

2.By Division:

Example:In 256, 128, 64, 32, … the pattern is decreasing by dividing the previous number by 2.

Image Pattern

Image pattern involves some shapes that are repeating themselves in a particular manner.

In this pattern the sides of the images are increased by one.

Logical Pattern

A logical pattern requires the ability to discover meaningful patterns in a strange and unpredictable way. To understand logical patterns, use of intuition is most important. Here an example of a logical pattern is given below.

Here the rule is the number of the line is increasing by one to form a close figure such that the new line never touches the last line added.

Letter Pattern

Letter pattern involves the 26 letters in the English alphabet. This pattern follows some particular rules which one has to understand by observing the pattern. Here an example of a word pattern is given below.

Z, Y, X, W, V, U, ….

In the above pattern, the letters from the universal English alphabets are written in reverse order.