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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Mathematicians have discovered a single shape that can be used to cover a surface completely without ever creating a repeating pattern. The long-sought shape is surprisingly simple but has taken ...

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 continue indefinitely. That square grid has a property shared ...