WASHINGTON – Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years. Historians have long ...

When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. The Harvard graduate student in physics was fascinated by the beautiful and ...

Consider the tiles on a bathroom floor or wall; they’re often arranged in a repeating pattern. But is there a single shape that tiles such a surface — an infinite one — in a pattern that never repeats ...