| | | Professor Natalie Frank
~ What is aperiodic order and why are people so excited about it ? ~
The festival's opening lecture was given by Natalie Frank. I have previously had the pleasure of watching her lecture on generalisations of the Rudin-Shapiro sequences. Well aware that she was setting the scene, she took care establishing basics, managing to do this in an engaging manner, not least by swiftly presenting the problem of Heesch Numbers and the easily understood but unresolved question; “Excluding infinity, how large can they be”? Progress was then steady, teasing out the difference between periodic and aperiodic via the tiling sets of Wang, Robinson, and Penrose. All the while, as we moved from past to present, the aperiodic tiling sets considered needed fewer different tiles. Naturally, the talk culminated by presenting the Hat and Spectre monotiles. This was a masterful introduction with a pleasing amount of mathematical detail for those that wanted it, and lots of thought provoking images for those simply after a broad understanding of why the discovery of the Hat is a big deal. The talk was recorded and Natalie has also generously made her slides freely available.
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