Japanese designer and computer scientist Asao Tokolo has devised a way to tile a pattern of arabesques in such a way that each square tile can be randomly rotated and still match up with all of its neighbours. It’s much more complicated than it looks and scholarly papers have been written on how he did it. He has produced a number of applications of the design – tiles, stencils – but the most satisfying one is a beautiful set of fridge magnets which allows you to produce endless patterns of your own. From the NYT’s The Moment.
How ideas have their own lives! I introduced almost the same idea, but not as perfectly carried out, as an art student in 1970. You can find it in my blog.