Etymology 2
From German ein Stein, "one stone", coined by scientists in recent decades, but with tongue-in-cheek tacit acknowledgment of the homonymy with einstein and Einstein; "a pun playing with the famous scientist's name and the German term "ein Stein" for "one stone".[1]
Noun
einstein (plural einsteins)
- (mathematics, physics) A shape that can be repeated to cover a plane with a nonrepeating pattern.
2023 March 28, Siobhan Roberts, “Elusive ‘Einstein’ Solves a Longstanding Math Problem. And it all began with a hobbyist “messing about and experimenting with shapes””, in New York Times, retrieved 2023-03-28:In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” — more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”)
References
"Klaassen, Bernhard (2022) “Forcing nonperiodic tilings with one tile using a seed”, in European Journal of Combinatorics, volume 100, number C, →DOI, page 103454