It was long thought that all crystals are made of atoms ordered into a periodic repeating pattern — analogous to the way in which hexagonal cells form the repeated pattern of a honeycomb, for example, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Why do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I’ve written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I ...