The einstein tile rocked mathematics. Meet its molecular cousin

For centuries, mathematicians and floor designers alike have been fascinated by the shapes that can tile a plane — in particular, those that do so without repetition.

Now, a team of chemists has described a molecule that naturally assembles into these irregular patterns, laying the groundwork for engineering materials that behave differently from regular solids.

“When these things seem to arise spontaneously in nature, I think it’s absolutely fascinating,” says Craig Kaplan, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada who was not involved in the study. “It feels like you found a glitch in the matrix.”