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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

I think I am obsessed with aperiodic Penrose tilings. My 21 month old son's room has an area rug with such a tiling. I want to tile a bathroom in my house with them at some point. If you want to make my day, link a photo you have of one of these IRL.

It is such a wicked combination of beauty and math, like fractals.

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Depending on how much free time you have, you may or may not want to dive into the rabbithole of aperiodic tilings in medieval Islamic architecture.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-islamic-penrose-...

This is amazing. I just wish Islam was known for this still, instead of some other things.

Photos of a Penrose pavement here https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/outreach/oxford-mathematics-alpha... and here https://hardscape.co.uk/inspire/case-studies/maths-institute...

https://media.giphy.com/media/14vFOciTnQjnl6/giphy.gif

A company tried to put it on toilet paper but Roger Penrose claimed ownership so they had to stop http://bit-player.org/2017/sir-roger-penroses-toilet-paper

Does he have ownership over ALL aperiodic tilings or just the ones he's come up with?

Anyway, that's unfortunate. Can't he just get a cut or something?

Also, this all really begs the question as to whether this is an "invention" or just "math". Imagine if Newton's heirs had to get a cut every time Newtonian physics was used (or calculus for that matter... splitting it with Leibniz's heirs)

Since it’s aperiodic, shouldn’t he only be able to claim copyright on the configurations he actually produced? Algorithms aren’t copyrightable, only concrete works fixed in a medium of expression.

Where can I get such a rug? I fixed up my home office a couple years ago and it's nice except I need a rug both to make it look nice and to absorb some sound.

I was wrong. I found something that resembled such a tiling, but was not, in fact, such a tiling. It was a fallback position. :/

If you do find any such thing, please let me know!

I searched a bit and found some on society6: https://society6.com/product/penrose-tiling6298504_rug?sku=s... https://society6.com/product/penrose-tiling-pattern_rug?sku=...

I have no idea if their rugs are any good, though, and I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to find out.

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