Penrose Tiling

Aperiodic tiling via substitution/inflation rules

Tiles: —
Penrose P2 tiling (Roger Penrose, 1974): two tile shapes — kite and dart — tile the plane aperiodically. No translation maps the tiling to itself. The ratio of kites to darts → φ = (1+√5)/2 (golden ratio). Inflation: each tile subdivides into smaller kites/darts by a factor of 1/φ. Discovered to describe real materials: quasicrystals (Shechtman 1984, Nobel 2011) have icosahedral symmetry — Penrose-like long-range order without periodicity. The tiling has 5-fold symmetry but no 5-fold periodic lattice.