Patterns appear widely throughout nature and math, from the Fibonacci spirals of sea shells to the periodicity of crystals. But certain math problems can sometimes trick the human solver into seeing a ...

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 ...

And it all began with a hobbyist “messing about and experimenting with shapes.” An “aperiodic monotile,” or einstein, is a shape that tiles an infinite flat surface in a nonrepeating pattern. The ...

“Hello! I am David Kaplan, and I am not an expert. But I hope in this series to learn as much as possible and explain it to you the best way I can.” “The second installment of the series dives deep ...

In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange for cash. It wasn’t organized ...

A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and crumpled it into a seemingly disordered ball of chaos. He held it up for the audience to ...

This is the second in a two-part series. Part one can be found here. The debate over what early math should look like and what should be included in the Common Core State Standards for math is one of ...

Mathematical patterns reveal profound truths about the universe and, surprisingly, about our inner lives as well. These five visual math concepts offer unique frameworks for understanding our behavior ...

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 ...