In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange for cash. It wasn’t organized ...

Pattern formation in physical, biological, and sociological systems has been studied for many years. One area where it has been of growing interest is in crime modeling. Pattern formation in physical, ...

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more. A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and ...

John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns of every possible length. In 1969, the British mathematician John Conway devised a beguilingly simple ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...

"I was a landscape architect who turned to a life of crime," jokes Robert Cheetham, founder of Azavea, a software development and research firm based in Philadelphia. Fourteen years ago, he was one of ...

Use one of the services below to sign in to PBS: You've just tried to add this video to My List. But first, we need you to sign in to PBS using one of the services below. You've just tried to add this ...