Truchet Tiles

This pattern was named for Sebastien Truchet (1657-1729) who was a Dominican priest who studied tiles and the patterns generated by tiles. He was studying, in a more graphical way, probability, which was apparently the hot topic at the time.

(Truchet is also the one who invented the point system for measuring characters in typesetting. When you set your font to '12' in Word, you can thank him.)

The pattern I used was invented by Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgist and historian of technology at MIT, who used Truchet tiles to study crystals. He wrote an article in 1987 which included this particular pattern, a pattern which has since been widely used and has acquired the name 'Truchet'. I discovered it in the textbook for my Computer Graphics class.

It's only two tiles: and . If one tile is visible and your mouse passes over it, the other tile is made visible. It's just images and JavaScript.