| | | David Smith
~ The Man Who Discovered The Hat and The Spectre ~
The photograph on the left is of David Smith, artist and amateur mathematician, who discovered the Hat (pictured upper right) and, a few weeks later, a second aperiodic monotile, the Spectre (pictured lower right). I'd arrived early to find a spot from which to distribute a couple of hundred free copies of M500, The Open University Mathematics magazine. David was setting up a table selling sets of Hat tiles and related materials. He generously allowed me space on his stall to set out the magazines. It is great that this gentle and good natured lover of mathematical puzzles with an artistic element is the person who discovered the Hat, rather than a mathematics professor. It illustrates that significant mathematical discoveries can still be made by amateurs who are simply curious.
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