Ever wanted an actual one-of-a-kind bathroom or kitchen? Well, mathematicians have found the perfect tile for you. A team from the University of Arkansas have discovered the first shape that can cover ...

Infinitely many copies of a 13-sided shape can be arranged with no overlaps or gaps in a pattern that never repeats. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss (CC BY ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

What just happened? A group of mathematicians created a "new" polygon previously known to exist only in theory. It's a 13-sided shape that they dubbed "the hat," even though it only vaguely resembles ...

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 ...