Math in… Zellij

Did you know that math has lived in different cultures in various forms for centuries?

Zellij, a style of mosaic tilework made from hand-chiseled tiles, is a form of Islamic art. It is an example of tessellation, which is the covering of a surface with geometric shapes, such as circles or polygons, without gaps or overlaps. Mathematicians have generalized this notion to even more abstraction, and studied how higher dimensional geometric objects fit together in spaces!