Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.
But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”
More here.
