WASHINGTON – Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years. Historians have long ...

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, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option—they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can ...

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 discovery earlier this year of the “hat” tile marked the culmination of hundreds of years of work into tiles and their symmetries. Every day we see examples of repeating motifs. This symmetry and ...

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 ...

A new 13-sided shape is the first example of an elusive "einstein" — a single shape that can be tiled infinitely without repeating a pattern. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...

A 13-sided shape known as “the hat” has mathematicians tipping their caps. It’s the first true example of an “einstein,” a single shape that forms a special tiling of a plane: Like bathroom floor tile ...