Often decorated with line segments that align beautifully, the generally non-repeating tilings of Islamic art (a mathematician would call them non-periodic) seem like geometric magic. Building on the work of Briton Roger Penrose on non-periodic tilings, two American physicists, Peter James Lu of Harvard University and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, showed that the tilings we so admire are in fact generated by five simple polygons, all of whose sides are the same length: the girih tiles.
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Tiles like no others
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