Tiling the Planes

[P6 Maths and up: Tessellations]

You might remember that one topic where you're supposed to draw 8 copies of parallelograms around one to complete. Yeah, that one. It's from a field of mathematics that's easy to understand, but hard to fully grasp - Geometry.

For those from secondary schools and up, here's a question: Isn't it sort of weird how you learned about something like that in Primary school, yet you pretty much never use it at all in your secondary school or tertiary institutions?

Well, yeah, because it's not easy. (And also because Singapore isn't a country where you'll use it for a future job but nobody talks about that)

Aperiodic tilings may seem like a weird thing to study, but you could see how useful it is in actual practice - Renovation and infrastructure companies stand to learn a lot from how they can use two default shapes to tile the floor they need to build on. There's a balance that such companies often need to strike, between form and function.

Sometimes it's easier and cheaper to just stick to square tiles, and you're designing a private house anyway so they don't really mind the square shapes. Sometimes you're designing an atrium, and you need it to look professional and cool, in which case the aperiodic tilings really help to make your work look different from someone else's architecture. (Dodging copyright strikes like they're cannonballs! Haha.)