“It’s sitting right in the hexagons. How many people are going to be kicking themselves around the world wondering, why didn’t I see that?” MARJORIE SENECHAL, a mathematician at Smith College, after ...

And it all began with a hobbyist “messing about and experimenting with shapes.” An “aperiodic monotile,” or einstein, is a shape that tiles an infinite flat surface in a nonrepeating pattern. The ...

Creatively tiling a bathroom floor isn’t just a stressful task for DIY home renovators. It is also one of the hardest problems in mathematics. For centuries, experts have been studying the special ...

The surprisingly simple tile is the first single, connected tile that can fill the entire plane in a pattern that never repeats — and can’t be made to fill it in a repeating way. In mid-November of ...