
A first overview
Tiling began as a practical idea. Roads and houses were paved long before anyone saw mathematics in them! Since then, the concept has been extended, and today even non-Euclidean and four-dimensional spaces are tiled…


Tiling began as a practical idea. Roads and houses were paved long before anyone saw mathematics in them! Since then, the concept has been extended, and today even non-Euclidean and four-dimensional spaces are tiled…


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The tilings and interlaced designs of medieval Islamic art command our admiration. But could a few simple geometric shapes lie behind this apparent complexity of line segments, interlacing, nested curves and polygons?

The decorative patterns of the Alhambra in Granada, a fortress built in the 14th century, encompass all the symmetry groups of plane tilings that can be repeated using two nonparallel translations. But this finding is recent, incomplete and somewhat controversial...

Sir Roger Penrose is renowned for his remarkable and foundational work in geometry and cosmology, and for the applications of that work to black holes. It is puzzling, however, that he is famous to the general public for the tiling that bears his name, with its many remarkable properties.

Some craftspeople have become masters of the art of tiling, such as those who were commissioned to decorate the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. This inevitably raises geometric questions. Which tiles can cover the plane? What symmetries emerge?
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