Friday, 31 March 2023

Hats off

Mathematicians have announced that they have discovered a 'new' 13 sided shape that they're calling 'The Hat'. 

What's so special about it?

Well, it's an 'aperiodic monotile', which means that this single shape can tile a surface without any translational symmetry, or without its pattern ever repeating. And that was something that, until very recently, had been theorised but never found. 



The monotile was discovered by a multinational research team led by David Smith and Chaim Goodman-Strauss. 

'You’re literally looking for like a one in a million thing. You filter out the 999,999 of the boring ones, then you’ve got something that’s weird, and then that’s worth further exploration,' explains Goodman-Strauss. 'And then by hand you start examining them and try to understand them, and start to pull out the structure. That’s where a computer would be worthless as a human had to be involved in constructing a proof that a human could understand.'

Here's a link to the academic paper, if you fancy it.


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