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 ...

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 ...

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 ...