Have you ever found yourself captivated by the intricate repeating designs on fabric, wrapping paper, and more? There’s something truly magical about repeating patterns that can transform ordinary ...

Infinitely many copies of a 13-sided shape can be arranged with no overlaps or gaps in a pattern that never repeats. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss (CC BY ...

John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns of every possible length. In 1969, the British mathematician John Conway devised a beguilingly simple ...

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 ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

What just happened? A group of mathematicians created a "new" polygon previously known to exist only in theory. It's a 13-sided shape that they dubbed "the hat," even though it only vaguely resembles ...