Comment by pohl
9 hours ago
Don't miss that you can click through to aperiodictable.com to see it live.
Also: when did everyone stop calling this quasiperiodic and start calling it aperiodic? I feel like the almost-but-not-quite translational symmetry was a useful distinction. Has it fallen out of favor?
Everyone's focused on the aperiodic part, meanwhile I'm wondering just what about this visual qualifies as a "table"...I suppose "aperiodic voronoi" doesn't quite have the same ring.
I believe it is just "as of" the XKCD comic, for which "aperiodic table" seems more sensible than "quasiperiodic table" for how the comic was written. The exciting thing about using the Penrose tiling is that you get "aperiodic" without it just being completely arbitrary. For that it is natural to borrow XKCD's terminology for this particular project.
I don't think mathematicians are going to change their term to "aperiodic". Almost everything is aperiodic. Quasiperiodic indicates something much more interesting is happening.