Consider the tiles on a bathroom floor or wall; they’re often arranged in a repeating pattern. But is there a single shape that tiles such a surface — an infinite one — in a pattern that never repeats ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Computer generated image of concentric rings around a central shaded hat (dark blue). Look carefully! Mathematicians have invented ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...