Grad Student Colloquium

Kieran Mastel, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"An Aperiodic Monotile"

Last year, David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss found the first example of an aperiodic monotile (or ‘einstein’), solving a longstanding open problem. We will look at the ‘hat’ tile they define and try to visually understand why it tiles the plane and why none of its tilings are periodic.