Tessellations aren’t just eye-catching patterns—they can be used to crack complex mathematical problems. By repeatedly ...

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 ...

For centuries, mathematicians and floor designers alike have been fascinated by the shapes that can tile a plane — in particular, those that do so without repetition. Now, a team of chemists has ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...

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 ...

Have you ever admired how the slats of a hardwood floor fit together so cleanly, or how the hexagons underneath your bathroom rug perfectly meet up? These are examples of geometric tilings, ...