been observed to form large patches of aperiodic patterns. The physics of this discovery has revived the interest in incommensurate structures and frequencies suggesting to link aperiodic tilings with interference phenomena. Confusion regarding terminology The term aperiodic has been used in a wide variety of ways in the mathematical literature on tilings (and in other mathematical fields as well, such as dynamical systems or graph theory, with altogether different meanings). With respect to tilings the term aperiodic was sometimes used synonymously with the term non-periodic. A non-periodic tiling is simply one that is not fixed by any non-trivial translation. Sometimes the term described – implicitly or explicitly – a tiling generated by an aperiodic set of prototiles. Frequently the term aperiodic was just used vaguely to describe the structures under consideration, referring to physical aperiodic solids, namely quasicrystals, or to something non-periodic with some kind of global order. The use of the word "tiling" is problematic as well, despite its straightforward definition. There is no single Penrose tiling, for example: the Penrose rhombs admit infinitely many tilings (which cannot be distinguished locally). A common solution is to try to use the terms carefully in technical writing, but recognize the widespread use of the informal terms. See also Girih tiles List of aperiodic sets of tiles Quasicrystal Zellige References External links The Geometry Junkyard Aperiodic Tilings The Infinite Pattern That Never Repeats