MoMath has Truchet tilings in its bathrooms that contain hidden messages. The concept of hiding words in a Truchet tiling was first presented by David Reimann at a Bridges conference, then conveyed to MoMath by George Hart.

During the MoMath gala in the 2016 election year, everyone who arrived was given a small piece of a Truchet tiling with a grid identification as to where to put it on a large board. The pieces looked like this.

Here are people placing their pieces:

Here is what the final image looked like, after all the guests added their tiles.  I told the guests if they leaned to the left (literally as well as figuratively), they would see a message telling them who to vote for in blue letters.  If they leaned to the right, the message would be in red.  There was a ripple of surprise and then laughter in the room when people read the messages.

People liked the gala event so much that we did a similar event for the winter solstice in December 2016.

Then I had an idea: What if people could play with small tiles like these?  

We now sell these at Additions, the shop at MoMath.

And then, another idea: moving into the third dimension!  We use these at festivals and call it Play Truchet.

I shared the cube idea with Colin Beveridge at a G4G (Gathering for Gardner) conference, and we spent a lot of time talking about the different ways one could pattern a cube with a Truchet tiling.  Colin later wrote an article about this for Chalkdust magazine: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/features/too-good-to-be-truchet/.

Later that summer, I gave a talk at the Bridges conference about all the Truchet tiling fun I’d been having. (It was great to see David Reimann in the audience!)  In my talk, I spoke briefly about the history of Truchet tiles, first described in a 1704 memoir by Sébastien Truchet and then popularized in 1987 by metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith.

Imagine my surprise several years later, when I happened to meet a fellow named Stuart Denman in Seattle and discovered he was the grandson of Cyril Stanley Smith!

We came full circle when David Reimann presented a talk in MoMath’s Math Encounters series called Play Truchet: Fun with Tiling Patterns and Generalizations — and he was introduced by Stuart Denman.  :)

As a pleasant postscript, I recently discovered that Colin’s article led MathsCity in the UK to make their own version of Play Truchet cubes.  It's great the way ideas spread among the math outreach community as we jointly share the joy of math with the world.

—Cindy Lawrence, Executive Director and CEO, National Museum of Mathematics