As you may have seen from Matt Parker’s latest video, there is a new contest for the recently discovered Hat and Spectre tiles! For more details about this recent discovery please see the MoMath article about this “ein stein” (a pun for “one stone” in German).
Some background
Check out the author’s explanation:
and a great overview from Numberphile:
also Scientific American also has a writeup with some of the history of this problem.
Contest ideas
Since part of this contest is open worldwide, we can all submit something… some ideas:
- An art project with printed out or cut pieces (Starting with examples from https://www.t3puzzle.com/a/?)
- Experiment with the software they used – Craig Kaplin, one of the researchers, has some of his software available here.
- More puns? a breakfast cereal “I’ll eat my hat” like he noted in the explanatory video above?
- Historical patterns – has this pattern been inadvertently used anywhere before? If not, maybe it could be a way to prove certain object was created after the announcement in 2023?
- laser cut tiles for a coffee table puzzle (might be a good gift for mathematicians)
To take the exported svg from here to better make a black and white laser-cutter template, simply search and replace fill=”.*” with fill=”none” in Geany, VS code or any other editor that can search-replace with regex.
Of course, don’t forget Spectre, which some mathematicians think is better as it tiles with no flipped tiles – making some say that the Ein-stein tiling is technically two tiles. Read about it on InterestingEngineering.