A picture provided by Craig Kaplan of the Penrose tiling with kites and darts. (David Smith by way of The New York Occasions) Final November, after a decade of failed makes an attempt, David Smith, a self-described hobbyist of the shape from Bridlington in East Yorkshire, England, suspected he had lastly solved an open downside within the arithmetic of tiling: that’s, he thought he may have found a einstein. In much less poetic phrases, an einstein is an aperiodic monotile, a form that tiles a aircraft, or an infinite two-dimensional flat floor, however solely in a non-repeating sample. (The time period einstein comes from the German ein stein, or extra…