Scientists discover tens of thousands of alternatives to the traditional Windsor knot.
Charles Q. Choi
(Inside Science) --Until now, scientists thought there were only 85 different ways to tie a typical necktie. Now researchers inspired by the Matrix trilogy of movies have discovered thousands more.
"There are far, far more knots than were previously known," said researcher Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, a computational mathematician at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
The most commonly used tie knot, the four-in-hand, originated in late 19th-century England — drivers are thought to have used it to tie their scarves around their necks in case they lost the reins of their horse-driven four-in-hand carriages. In the 1930s, the Duke of Windsor is credited with introducing what is now known as the Windsor knot, from which its smaller derivative, the half-Windsor, evolved. It took another 50 years or so until a new tie knot appeared, the Pratt, invented by Jerry Pratt, an employee at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Then, at the turn of the 21st century, physicists Thomas Fink and Yong Mao at the University of Cambridge in England analyzed what knots could be tied with a normal-sized necktie. They found 85 knots, which included the four traditional ones as well as nine more "aesthetic knots" they dubbed nice-looking enough to wear.
However, Fink and Mao's knots all forced the front of the tie knot — the "façade" — to be a flat stretch of fabric. In 2003, in "The Matrix Reloaded," the second of the films making up the Matrix trilogy, the villain known as "The Merovingian" introduced fancy new knots where the façade was textured with many surfaces and edges instead, tied with the narrow end of a tie.
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