Scientists have discovered a new 13-sided shape that can do amazing things.

Computer scientists have found the holy grail of tile. They call “einstein” the only shape that can cover a plane without repeating a pattern. And all it takes for this particular shape is 13 edges. In the world of mathematics, the “non-periodic monotile”, also known as Einstein, based on the German expression for “solitary stone”, is a shape that can form a plane but never repeat itself.

“In this paper, we present the first true nonperiodic monotile, a shape that achieves non-periocity through geometry alone, with no additional constraints imposed by matching conditions,” writes Craig Kaplan, professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo and one of four. writers. “We are proving that this shape, a polycyte we call the ‘hat,’ must be folded into tiles based on a system of substitution.”

“You’re literally looking for something like one in a million,” he says. New Scientist Chaim Goodman-Strauss is a professor at the University of Arkansas and a member of the team. “You filter out 999,999 of the boring stuff and then you find something weird and then it’s worth further investigation. Then you start manually examining them, trying to understand and extract the structure.”

There has never been such a breakthrough in the history of non-periodic tiles. Kaplan tweeted that there were more than 20,000 tiles in the first non-periodic sets. “Further research reduced that number to sets of 92, then six, and then two, in the shape of the famous Penrose tiles.” But these Penrose tiles were from 1974.

“Since then,” Kaplan writes, “others have created two-dimensional sets, but no one has found ‘einstein’, a single shape that periodically spawns an airplane. Could such a form exist?”

And so now.

The team proved the nature of the shape using computer coding and, interestingly, the shape does not lose its aperiodicity even as the side lengths change.