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Besides tiling your bathroom is there any use case for this? Or is this pure for fun and gaining knowledge? Edit: The article is talking about building structures but isn't a triangle the most rigid form? And triangles are already used in building.
Should it be discounted if it were done for pure fun?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a pun, not clickbait. This is not the death of "journalistic integrity".
No, the original title is clearly clickbait – meant to be misinterpreted as something other than what the article is about. Here is what a real pun in a newspaper headline looks like: http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/03/22/on-astronomy-minors/
PUN: Attack on the pentagon results in discovery of new mathematical tile
CB: Breaking News: Pentagon attack
Many of these types are basically combining two pentagons into an octagon (or even hexagon) then tiling it across the plane. For some reason, intuitively those seem more easy to me (2 * 3, 2 * 4), so that you could just generate a bunch of them, and split them in two to create tessellating pentagons? Even the example in the article can be viewed as a regularly tessellating nonagon. I don't see what's "irregular" abou…
Meta question: where can I find list of simple unsolved/undiscovered problems like these in math? It does not appear in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
I don't think that tiling a plane is exactly a "simple" problem.
Simple doesn't mean easy. Factoring a 2048 bit number is very simple and very hard.
"That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James’ discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice
"Attack on the pentagon" ...aaaand the guardian has lowered themselves to buzzfeed's standards.
Besides tiling your bathroom is there any use case for this? Or is this pure for fun and gaining knowledge? Edit: The article is talking about building structures but isn't a triangle the most rigid form? And triangles are already used in building.
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene, a molecule inspired by architecture.
"Attack on the pentagon" ...aaaand the guardian has lowered themselves to buzzfeed's standards.
This headline is also completely unlike the buzzfeed-clickbait headlines. Buzzfeed tries to exploit psychological weaknesses (Mathematicians attack the pentagon – you won't believe what happened next).
Headlines like the Guardian's are much better in that they're still entertaining after you've read the story. Sometimes I think they're written more for the amusement of the editor than anything else.
Other guardian headline I saved: "Blight in Italy leaves pine nut nuts pining for more"
Besides tiling your bathroom is there any use case for this? Or is this pure for fun and gaining knowledge? Edit: The article is talking about building structures but isn't a triangle the most rigid form? And triangles are already used in building.
Sure there are. There are many processes where you want to "tile" a surface with identical smaller parts. I'd assume it's something that happens with solar panels. Possibly also on the molecular level with coatings etc. Having more options for the shape of the constituent parts may be an advantage. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene , a molecule inspired by architecture.