How to Make a 51-Star Flag

By Chris Wilson

June 9, 2010

How would the flag be rearranged if the United States added another state? It's not an entirely moot question. In the spring of 2010, Congress considered a bill that could lead to Puerto Rico's inclusion as the 51st state.

To take this question to the absurd extreme, we made a Flash widget that can compute the symmetrical pattern for any number of stars on the flag up to 100, with a few tricky exceptions for 29, 69, and 87 stars, for which none of our six patterns found a match.

With the help of mathematician Skip Garibaldi, we wrote algorithms for all the possible patterns: alternating rows of even and odd stars, rectanglar matrices, etc. For each number of stars entered, an Actionscript function checks which of the six patterns can produce that number.