David Speiser, frequent Nexus conference participant and presenter, discusses what the aims, methods, and criteria for research into the relationships between architecture and mathematics should be.

This sixth book in the Nexus: Architecture and Mathematics conference series marks the tenth year of Nexus activities. The papers included here further broaden the horizons of interdisciplinary studies in architecture and mathematics. Over the years, Nexus has truly shown itself to have created just that: a nexus between disciplines, between "languages", between cultures. This new collection of papers carries on the splendid interdisciplinary variety that has characterized the previous four volumes: architects, historians, theoreticians, mathematicians and scientists from the world over -- Italy, Turkey, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Brazil and Scotland -- present papers on subjects as diverse as the mathematics of the Doric order, the Hagia Sophia, geometry and ethics, paving a famous city square with quasi-periodic tiling, perspective construction in the fourth dimension, and the influence of computer technology on architecture. Western architecture of almost every period is examined: Greek, Roman, medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and contemporary. This volume adds thirteen more important papers to the growing collection of studies in architecture and mathematics that forms the heart of the Nexus conferences and the Nexus Network Journal.