Illustration by Casey Mann for theguardian.com
Whoever said higher mathematics wasn’t practical didn’t work at Life Floor.
Here in Minnesota, we tile the plane all the time, but almost always with squares. We have big dreams to create a hexagon tile (harder to do overseas, but with our manufacturers next door in South Dakota, it’s a possibility we’re excited to explore), but apparently there are even more sides to the argument for different tile shapes, as we learned this week from The Guardian:
“If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane. Every triangle can tile the plane. Every four-sided shape can also tile the plane. Things get interesting with pentagons. The regular pentagon cannot tile the plane. [...] But some non-regular pentagons can.”
There were 13 known shapes that can tile the plane until last month, when a team of mathematicians found a 14th. According to the people that would know, there’s no reason that more couldn’t exist. At Life Floor, we put out this charge to all mathematicians, especially those laboring in the shape-mines: If you find yet another shape to tile a plane, we’ll at least consider offering it as a design option.
Maybe.
Read more about it at the theguardian.com
(Thanks to friend of the company, noted video game designer/writer Alex Kain for bringing this to our attention. )