WASHINGTON – Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years. Historians have long ...

Medieval Islamic designers used elaborate geometrical tiling patterns at least 500 years before Western mathematicians developed the concept. The geometric design, called “girih”, was widely used to ...

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 ...

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 ...

BOTHELL — One person’s idle doodling is another’s mathematical breakthrough. Two mathematics professors and one of their former students at the University of Washington at Bothell have made a ...

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 ...