The Penrose Chickens

In "Vicious Circles" you see how to make Penrose tiles which were invented by one of our maths heroes Roger Penrose. If you look at a patterned wallpaper, you'll see that the same pattern keeps coming up over and over again. The clever bit about these tiles is that you can put them together to cover an area, but even if you go on forever the pattern never will exactly repeat itself!

Mr Penrose went on to design two amazing shapes called "The Penrose Chickens". There's a fat one and a thin one as you can see here.

If you get loads of these two shapes, you can put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. The amazing thing is that the pattern will NEVER repeat.

You can buy a game that uses black and white versions of these two birds along with a very curious dog shape at Pentaplex.

Here's how an arrangement might start.

For a better view of our background pattern, scroll the page down.

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