Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman. This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for their ...

One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire ...

The recently discovered “hat” aperiodic monotile admits tilings of the plane, but none that are periodic [SMKGS23]. This polygon settles the question of whether a single shape—a closed topological ...

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 ...

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 ...

For a long time, scientists associated crystal structures with an ordered arrangement of atoms in a repeating lattice-like pattern, believing it to be the most stable configuration. However, by the ...

Many repeating, or periodic, tilings can be tweaked to form non-repeating ones. Consider, say, an infinite grid of squares, aligned like a chessboard. If you shift each row so that it’s offset by a ...