Your turn to reflect

When designers and artists look at shapes they imagine how the shape would look when turned around or when reflected in a mirror.

The bad news is that to use modern computer graphics packages (which most artists and designers do) you need to have a basic grounding in the maths which helps you tell the computer how you want to move the shapes.

However, the good news is that the maths involved is easy!

The key word you need to know is SYMMETRY. Shapes can "exhibit symmetry", "be symmetrical" etc. these phrases all mean the same things, either:

The shape can be cut in half (once or more times) and each piece will look the same (Reflection).

Or

The shape can be turned around its centre and at some point before turning full-circle will look the same as when you started (Rotation).

The shape below has rotational symmetry:

This shape is said to have rotational symmetry of order 4. This means that it can be rotated into 4 different positions and will still look the same. The pictures below have one of the sections of the square coloured red to show how the rotations are done: