![]() ![]() ![]() One came from noticing that the hats arrange themselves into larger clusters, called metatiles. Smith and colleagues proved that the tile was an einstein in two ways. “This is the first solution without asterisks,” says mathematician Michaël Rao of CNRS and École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. Taylor-Socolar tiles are aperiodic, but they are a jumble of multiple disconnected pieces - not what most people think of as a single tile. Parcly Taxel/Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 4.0) But Taylor-Socolar tiles have disconnected pieces (illustrated), stretching the definition of a tile. Taylor-Socolar tiles are the closest mathematicians had come previously to an “einstein,” a single tile that forms a pattern that never repeats. That one has finally been found, “it’s huge.” From there, “It was natural to wonder, could there be a single tile that does this?” says mathematician Casey Mann of the University of Washington Bothell, who was not involved with the research. In the 1970s, mathematician Roger Penrose discovered that just two different shapes formed a tiling that isn’t periodic ( SN: 3/1/07). Mathematicians previously knew of nonrepeating tilings that involved multiple tiles of different shapes. ![]() Before this work, if you’d asked what an einstein would look like, Goodman-Strauss says, “I would’ve drawn some crazy, squiggly, nasty thing.” That’s a type of shape that hadn’t been studied closely in the search for einsteins, says Chaim Goodman-Strauss of the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City, one of a group of trained mathematicians and computer scientists Smith teamed up with to study the hat. Identified by David Smith, a nonprofessional mathematician who describes himself as an “imaginative tinkerer of shapes,” and reported in a paper posted online March 20 at, the hat is a polykite - a bunch of smaller kite shapes stuck together. The “hat” (one highlighted) is a polygon made up of eight smaller kite shapes (dark gray lines). While it’s possible to arrange other single tiles in patterns that are not periodic, the hat is special because there’s no way it can create a periodic pattern. An infinite checkerboard, for example, looks just the same if you slide the rows over by two. With a periodic pattern, it’s possible to shift the tiles over and have them match up perfectly with their previous arrangement. Though the tiles fit neatly together and can cover an infinite plane, they are aperiodic, meaning they can’t form a pattern that repeats. The einstein sits in a weird purgatory between order and disorder. “It wasn’t even clear that such a thing could exist,” Senechal says.Īlthough the name “einstein” conjures up the iconic physicist, it comes from the German ein Stein, meaning “one stone,” referring to the single tile. ![]() Mathematicians had been searching for such a shape for half a century. “Everybody is astonished and is delighted, both,” says mathematician Marjorie Senechal of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., who was not involved with the discovery. It’s the first true example of an “einstein,” a single shape that forms a special tiling of a plane: Like bathroom floor tile, it can cover an entire surface with no gaps or overlaps but only with a pattern that never repeats. A 13-sided shape known as “the hat” has mathematicians tipping their caps. ![]()
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