The Aperiodic Table

Nice to see that human intuition depends on periodicity when structures become unperiodic , classification becomes harder even if the rules under are deterministic

Even after reading the Wikipedia entry I couldn't intuit what Aperiodicity means.

Does it mean simply lack of pattern? But that doesn't seem to be the case, at least visually.

Just last month I wrote a post about how Mendeleev's real genius was in how we went looking for periodicity [0] and how that helped predict elements.

Does aperiodicity have any cool properties that help in specific domains?

[0] https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...

Don't miss that you can click through to aperiodictable.com to see it live.

Also: when did everyone stop calling this quasiperiodic and start calling it aperiodic? I feel like the almost-but-not-quite translational symmetry was a useful distinction. Has it fallen out of favor?

Aside and maybe controversial:

If I didn’t know that the author used AI, then I would have liked this way more. But that is because I would assume the author did this on his own and that would feel like a cool quirky thing to do. I just don’t care for a cool quirky thing if an AI made it.

This is very cool, but are the actual relationships between the elements represented as you drag the table around? Or does it just set the element in the "nearest neighbor" spot?

I would have found an aperiodic monotile (single shape) a bit more satisfying.

https://momath.org/the-hat/

But the simplicity of the shapes in the Penrose tiling has its own charm. And the way it rearranges itself when scrolling around the tiling is awesome!

Tempted to 3D print something based on this. It's pretty neat. And now's the time, too, while the periodic table ends nicely at the last row.

Interesting! I just built aperiodicgenerator.com to do this with aperiodic monotiles. Would love some feedback!

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