Penrose tiling
Teselación de Penrose
- Date
- 1974 · confidence high
- Place
- University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- Roger Penrose
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Penrose found sets of just two shapes (rhombi, or 'kites and darts') that tile the plane completely without ever repeating periodically, with five-fold symmetry. The diffraction pattern of these tilings later helped explain quasicrystals, discovered by Dan Shechtman (2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry).
What it led to
- The theoretical understanding of quasicrystals (Shechtman, 1982/2011 Nobel)
- Mathematical study of aperiodic tilings
Built on
- Wang and Berger's aperiodic tile sets (1960s)