David Smith, a retired print technician from the north of England, was pursuing his hobby of looking for interesting shapes when he stumbled onto one unlike any other in November. When Smith shared ...

How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called ...

Fano varieties are known as the basic “atomic structure” of geometry, but are notoriously difficult to discover and organize. Scientists from the Imperial College of London have been attempting to ...

But in mathematics, things can be. Scholars consider circles and spheres perfect because of their high symmetry, which is one of the reasons why it was difficult to abandon the concept of circular ...