In the Footsteps of Daedalus: Labyrinth Studies Meets Visual Mathematics.

Karl Kerényi, the internationally renowned Hungarian classical philologist and scholar of religion, carried out significant mythological research on the labyrinth, both as a cultural symbol and a specific geometrical structure. In this paper, we summarize Ker´nyi's main findings and connect his mythological studies with visual-mathematical and ethno-mathematical research to provide a geometrical and topological analysis of these symbolic structures. In our visual mathematical analysis, we propose a very simple “cut and paste” construction of labyrinths based on a system of parallel black and white strips. Then we generalize the concept of the labyrinth and extend it to arbitrary graphs. Fin…