Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here

with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered

around the microphones of our four favourite fans from the last seven days and in no particular

order here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that so Roger Penrose, the mathematician

who's just won the Nobel Prize, once designed a theoretically infinite geometrical pattern

called the Penrose tiles. He then sued a toilet paper company for stealing it and creating

a theoretically infinite toilet paper roll. Why would you need an infinite... Well I suppose

that was a hard-ing toilet paper at the moment aren't they? Exactly.

Exactly. It won't be really easy. Okay so basically Roger Penrose, he's a brilliant brilliant

mathematician in the 1970s he invented this thing called Penrose Tiling which basically combines

two different rhomboids that can be repeated at infinite. There's pattern never repeats itself,

it's really amazing. He had just invented the fun as well, he does lots of stuff like this for fun,

he's fun as well as being a mathematician. But a few years later, in fact more than 20 years later

actually, after he invented it, his wife was in the supermarket and she saw some Kleenex

loop paper and it looked just like he said she thought I know that pattern and she bought some and

she took it home and the firm, the firm which only takes Kimberley Clark, they had come up with

toilet paper which copied it and he sued. Wow. He sued successfully? Well he won't talk about

what happened in court. It was amicably settled outside of court. Yeah, but I think the condition

was you can't say Roger Penrose that they gave you 20 billion quid or whatever, whatever the

stuff was. If he asked for like one pen every time they used his pattern and this is a pattern that

never ever repeats it then you could just get all the money in the world. The reason it's useful for

...