The astonishing math behind Penrose tilings

Rubber Flooring

Hmmm… more Escher than Penrose but that’s nothing a quick trip to my local laser cutting place can’t solve… :thinking: I wonder if they could be talked out of some bulk material

Laser cutters are awesome and I want one for the workshop. (…along with a high-power gyrotron for melting stuff… :crazy_face: but that’s another thread…)

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I know very little about math. Could you consider a tiling non-repeating if the bathroom contains only one single bathroom-shaped tile?

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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.

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Yes, you are right, but sadly that solution receives the rather derogatory mathematical label “trivial”. :slightly_frowning_face: Nonetheless, the good stuff often flows from a surprisingly simple starting point…

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Went online shopping for penrose tiles and found that Penrose is rather vehement and litigious about enforcing his IP licensing. So no go.

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Part of the problem is that Roger Penrose patented the shapes.

He also sued someone that put the patterns on toilet paper. The patent has since expired, but copyright lives a bit longer.

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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 :wink:

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There was also the game CirKis, which, unsurprisingly, is no longer in production.
CirKis

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What a square :slightly_frowning_face:

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Colors and shapes should not be possible to patent.

America’s great, isn’t it? I seem to remember basic words could be patented too.

Patent system is broken.

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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.

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