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 ...

By jiggling thousands of metal beads in a tray for a week, researchers have created the largest-ever quasicrystal — a structure that scientists previously considered impossible. First represented in ...

On March 20, 2023, a team of four researchers announced that they had discovered a shape. This was big news in the world of mathematics and was widely reported in the media. The reason for the ...

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 ...