WASHINGTON – Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years. Historians have long ...

Consider the tiles on a bathroom floor or wall; they’re often arranged in a repeating pattern. But is there a single shape that tiles such a surface — an infinite one — in a pattern that never repeats ...

Medieval Islamic designers used elaborate geometrical tiling patterns at least 500 years before Western mathematicians developed the concept. The geometric design, called “girih”, was widely used to ...