When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. The Harvard graduate student in physics was fascinated by the beautiful and ...

Islamic architects and mathematicians were creating quasi-crystalline patterns some 500 years before similar patterns were described in the West, claim two physicists in the US. Peter J Lu of Harvard ...

Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman. This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for their ...

Roger Penrose makes his own rules. He is one of the world's most distinguished mathematical physicists and most inventive thinkers. Penrose’s work on the theory of general relativity in the 1960s led ...

Patterning and periodic structures are very important in physics. This led to a tremendous amount of work on learning what shapes can tile an area or fill a volume. It was found that these shapes must ...

If someone asked you to walk in a straight line over a constantly shifting floor, you would probably declare it impossible after a few tries and a couple of grazed knees. Researchers studying a ...

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 ...

Ah, tiles. You can get square ones, and do a grid, or you can get fancier shapes and do something altogether more complex. By and large though, whatever pattern you choose, it will normally end up ...