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David Smith: 2 ideas and puzzles worth knowing

2 ideas and puzzles from David Smith, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• Britain was once joined to Europe by a landmass now sunk beneath the North Sea

  Doggerland was a broad plain linking Britain to continental Europe, exposed as ice sheets retreated around 18,000 years ago. As recently as 10,000 years ago, people could walk from…

  — Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch, David Smith, Europe's Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland

• A hobbyist's cardboard cutout finally solved a 50-year tiling mystery

  For decades, mathematicians searched for a single tile shape that could cover an infinite flat surface edge-to-edge with no gaps, yet never settle into a repeating pattern, somethi…

  — David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, Chaim Goodman-Strauss, An aperiodic monotile

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