A detail of the Mandelbrot set, a fractal named after Benoit Mandelbrot, the French mathematician who investigated it in the 1970s. If you were to zoom in at any point on the intricate, wiggly line, ...

Suppose you want to cover a standard 8-by-8 chessboard entirely with rectangular dominoes that each cover two squares on the board. It’s easy to imagine how you might do it: You could line the ...