Hmmm… more Escher than Penrose but that’s nothing a quick trip to my local laser cutting place can’t solve… I wonder if they could be talked out of some bulk material
Laser cutters areawesomeand I want one for the workshop.(…along with a high-power gyrotron for melting stuff… but that’s another thread…)
Also (after all the other links I added above) and lastly, this claims the pavement outside Oxford University’s Maths Dept has a Penrosey design. Off to see if I can find that.
Yes, you are right, but sadly that solution receives the rather derogatory mathematical label “trivial”. Nonetheless, the good stuff often flows from a surprisingly simple starting point…
From the second link I posted in the set of 4 above
I spent a bunch of time digging into this when I bought my current house because I initially could not believe that these were unobtanium and that custom cutting would be the only way to install such a pattern in my bath.
In short, there are 2 reasons for this. The first is that at the physical scale required for the nifty aperiodicity of the tiling to be apparent in a typical home (<= ~100cm^2 or 16 in^2, aka the areal size of a “standard bathroom tile” in North America,) tiles are typically sold and installed not individually but in mats of many tiles adhered to a backing webbing. This is not possible with an aperiodic tile pattern where the pattern does not, by definition, repeat predictably.
So that’s the first reason: practicality.
The second reason is exactly what you might expect if you have been around the sun more than 2 dozen times: Roger Penrose is notoriously litigious. He patented the aperiodic tilings he “discovered” in the late 70s, but famously sued Kimberly-Clark for making toilet tissue with one of these tilings in the 90s claiming copyright violation - and won. Even though the patent is long expired, copyright lives longer.
Ironically, given that the infringing bog rolls were almost certainly roller-embossed, Kimberly-Clark’s Kompetent Counsel seems to have missed a trick - their expression was NOT strictly a Penrose tiling as they are, by definition, aperiodic. You can’t emboss a continuous Penrose tiling from a roller.
Seems like their lawyer should have been a bit more of a mathematician
When a copyright suit comes down to facts rather than being thrown out on procedural grounds, it becomes ruinously expensive. It’s much cheaper to settle the case.
Otherwise, Kimberley-Clark could have argued that they were copying the pattern of the Khatryka meteorite, which Penrose surely did not create.