A shape is a monotile if copies of it can be fitted together without gaps or overlaps to fill all space, and if it is (strongly) aperiodic it can never do this in a way that has periodic symmetry.

A few weeks ago Ioannis Tsiokos announced the first true three-dimensional aperiodic monotile, entirely discovered and written up by an LLM, which named it Chair44 (the forty-four being of archetypically marginal relevance). The preprint is not really readable and the presentation is murky. But this presents a fun puzzle for people in this area and very soon we understood the Chair44 better. Among the known examples of aperiodic tile sets in which the tiles can only form  non-periodic “hierarchical” structures (a primary strategy for six decades), upon human inspection it turns out that the
Chair44 is the simplest and most elegant. We’ll show why the Chair44 is a (strongly) aperiodic monotile, and discuss implications for mathematics in this transitional moment.

Speaker Biography:

Chaim Goodman-Strauss is Outreach Mathematician at the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath). Born and raised in Austin, Tex., he earned his Ph.D. in Knot Theory at UT Austin in 1994 and served through 2022 on the mathematics faculty at the University of Arkansas, teaching a wide variety of courses at different levels. He has held visiting positions at the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota, Princeton University, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

He is a leader in the study of aperiodic tilings and tiling theory, on the team bringing David Smith’s “hat” tile to the world. With John H. Conway and Heidi Burgiel, he is a coauthor of the books “The Symmetries of Things” and the new “The Magic Theorem.”
Goodman-Strauss is a mathematical illustrator and sculptor, producing participation math-art builds for numerous festivals such as the Gathering for Gardner and NY Math Fest.

Goodman-Strauss has been involved in mathematical outreach for more than twenty-five years, beginning the Saturday Morning Math Group at U.T. and later producing the Math Factor segment/podcast. Since
2012 he has been teaching young mathematicians at Epsilon Camp and Campersand, and is now full time at MoMath.

Date & Time: Thursday October 15th at 7:00 PM

Location: Maynooth University

Speaker: Chaim Goodman-Strauss (National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath)

Register at: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/ian-dangerfield-lecture-tickets-2002793647714 or click on Book Now!