The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option—they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can ...

Some of the greatest features in Photoshop are the text, object, and image effects such as Textures, Patterns, Gradients, and Styles. Styles are those amazing special effects that you see rolling ...

Creatively tiling a bathroom floor isn’t just a stressful task for DIY home renovators. It is also one of the hardest problems in mathematics. For centuries, experts have been studying the special ...