Einstein problem (aperiodic monotile)
Does there exist a single connected closed topological disk (an "einstein", from the German ein Stein, "one stone") such that congruent copies of can tile the entire Euclidean plane without overlaps or gaps, yet every such tiling is non-periodic (invariant under no nonzero translation)?
Solved in 2023 by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss. In March 2023 they announced the "hat", a 13-sided polykite made of eight kites from the Laves tiling, and proved via hierarchical substitution metatiles and a computer-assisted case analysis of surrounding clusters that it tiles only non-periodically (using both unreflected and reflected copies). Two months later, in May 2023, the same four authors introduced the "Spectre", a 14-sided tile with gently curved or notched edges that is a strictly chiral aperiodic monotile: even when reflections are permitted, the Spectre tiles the plane only using pure translations and rotations, and every tiling is non-periodic.
References
- David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, Chaim Goodman-Strauss (2024). An aperiodic monotile · DOI:10.5070/C64163843 · arXiv:2303.10798v2
- David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, Chaim Goodman-Strauss (2024). A chiral aperiodic monotile · DOI:10.5070/C64264241 · arXiv:2305.17743v1
- Branko Grünbaum, G. C. Shephard (1987). Tilings and Patterns