This lavishly illustrated book provides a hands-on, step-by-step introduction to the intriguing mathematics of symmetry. Instead of breaking up patterns into blocks--a sort of potato-stamp ...

Tessellations aren’t just eye-catching patterns—they can be used to crack complex mathematical problems. By repeatedly ...

Long before anyone wrote down a number, early villagers were painting flowers with a precision that looks suspiciously like ...

Frank A. Farris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

On a set of broken clay bowls from northern Mesopotamia, delicate flower patterns have turned out to be something far more radical than decoration. New analysis of this ancient art suggests that early ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...

Teaching Children Mathematics (TCM) is an official journal of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and is intended as a resource for elementary school students, teachers, and teacher ...

A leopard is chasing a zebra, bound to follow the laws of nature and natural selection, down a sand dune and across a plain of dried mud, bound to the laws of geology and sediments. The stripes of the ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...