Monotile background

The aperiodic monotile behind the texture

An aperiodic monotile, commonly known as an "einstein," is a shape capable of tiling the plane exclusively in a non-periodic manner. Our jumbotron pattern features the first true aperiodic monotile: a shape that naturally enforces aperiodicity through its own geometry, without the need for additional constraints such as matching conditions.

The jumbotron pattern is based on the aperiodic monotile - also called an einstein - a polykite shape that tiles the plane only without repeating. It comes from the work of David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss. We like elegant maths.

Same explainer ships on the public Colophon page; this tab is the canonical surface-context version inside the design system.