GEOMETRY PUZZLE: WHAT SHAPE DO YOU SEE?

TRICKY TILINGS:

Tiling stores are like treasure troves of geometrical amusement. Here’s a photo I took yesterday. The puzzle is simply: what shape(s) do you see?

ANSWER:
most people see a cube first. Our brains appear to be hard-wired to see 3D shapes, in keeping with the 3D world we inhabit. But of course what we actually have here is three rhombi put together to make a regular hexagon.

RHOMBUS (plural rhombi) is formally a quadrilateral with four equal sides, or informally a “wonky square” (Mathematicians prefer the word rhombus to the slightly fuzzy “Diamond”).