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1923 – 2017United States
Marjorie Rice
You don't need a degree to discover something genuinely new.
A short story
An American homemaker with five children and no university maths degree who read about a tiling puzzle in Scientific American. Working at her kitchen table, she discovered four new ways to tile the plane with non-regular five-sided shapes: patterns mathematicians had thought were already complete. Her notation was unconventional but her proofs were correct.
In their own words
I would not have called myself a mathematician, but I'd always loved patterns.
Attributed to Marjorie Rice in interviews about her tiling discoveries, 1976–1978.
The lab their idea turned into
Move Lab
Slide. Spin. Flip. Same shape, different pose.
Open Move Lab →