The Einstein Tile

A 13-sided tile called “the hat” forms a pattern that covers an infinite plane yet it cannot repeat, making it a long-sought shape known as an “einstein.” A sample of that pattern is shown here.

D. SMITH, J.S. MYERS, C.S. KAPLAN AND C. GOODMAN-STRAUSS (CC BY 4.0)





A 13-sided shape known as “the hat” has mathematicians tipping their caps.

It’s the first true example of an “einstein,” a single shape that forms a special tiling of a plane: Like bathroom floor tile, it can cover an entire surface with no gaps or overlaps but only with a pattern that never repeats.

“Everybody is astonished and is delighted, both,” says mathematician Marjorie Senechal of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., who was not involved with the discovery. Mathematicians had been searching for such a shape for half a century. “It wasn’t even clear that such a thing could exist,” Senechal says.

Although the name “einstein” conjures up the iconic physicist, it comes from the German ein Stein, meaning “one stone,” referring to the single tile. The einstein sits in a weird purgatory between order and disorder. Though the tiles fit neatly together and can cover an infinite plane, they are aperiodic, meaning they can’t form a pattern that repeats.

With a periodic pattern, it’s possible to shift the tiles over and have them match up perfectly with their previous arrangement. An infinite checkerboard, for example, looks just the same if you slide the rows over by two. While it’s possible to arrange other single tiles in patterns that are not periodic, the hat is special because there’s no way it can create a periodic pattern.  READ MORE...