We don’t look at polka dots twice. Our brains immediately recognize that they’re a repeating pattern of dots. The same goes for plaid, chevron or any kind of design. We’re also able to look at a bunch ...

Some habits feel like fate until they are named. We examine five influential psychology books that reveal why people repeat ...

John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns of every possible length. In 1969, the British mathematician John Conway devised a beguilingly simple ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...