The Economist (US), September 17th, 1988
A FLOOR can be covered with a regular pattern of squares: indeed many are. The same goes for equilateral triangles and regular hexagons. But no surface can be covered with a set of pentagons all of the same size. The impossibility of a floor-covering that has the five-fold" symmetry of pentagons is easily proved by a bit of doodling or a bit of mathematics: the spaces between pentagons are not pentagon-shaped.
Such an impossibility presents a challenge to the mathematical mind, which Dr Roger Penrose, of the Institute of Mathematics in Oxford, took up in the mid-1970s. He found that if you ...
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