Their work revives long-standing mathematical curiosities but does so through a fresh window – additive combinatorics.

Tessellation is a repeating pattern of the same shapes without any gaps or overlaps. These patterns are found in nature, used by artists and architects and studied for their mathematical properties.

The 14th pattern was found in 1982 by Rolf Stein of the University of Dortmund, Germany, and that was it for the next 33 years. The latest discovery came about with advances in software modeling.