[math-fun] 51 star design

I started looking at the packing problem for maximizing the size of n stars within a golden rectangle. The solution for 2 is interesting, and for 5 is bizarre. But the stars wind up pointing in a variety of directions, and it doesn't look as nice. I did find a nice method for packing similarly oriented touching stars, and 51 of them fit into a pentagon perfectly, so I made a picture. http://www.mathpuzzle.com/flag51.gif There are both loose and tight versions of the packing. I used the loose version for the flag picture. It has a number of interesting mathematical properties. For the tight packing, see http://www.mathpuzzle.com/51stars.gif --Ed Pegg Jr.