Marjorie Ruth Rice (née Jeuck;[4] 1923–2017) was an American amateur mathematician most famous for her discoveries of pentagonal tilings in geometry.

[6] Marjorie Rice was a San Diego[1] mother of five, who had become an ardent follower of Martin Gardner's long-running column, "Mathematical Games", which appeared monthly, 1957–1986, in the pages of Scientific American magazine.

was not completed until 1967 when Richard Brandon Kershner … found three pentagonal tilers that had been missed by all predecessors who had worked on the problem".

But within a month, Gardner received an example, by one of his readers, Richard James III,[9] of a new convex pentagon tiler, and published this news in his December 1975 column.

She worked on the problem in her free time and through the 1975 holiday season "by drawing diagrams on the kitchen table when no one was around and hiding them when her husband and children came home, or when friends stopped by".

Throughout her investigations, she explored how to use pentagonal tilings as grids on which to overlay tessellations of flowers, shells, butterflies and bees.

However, some of her investigations are indeed shown in The Mathematical Gardner, a compilation of articles in honour of the late Martin Gardner, with Doris Schattschneider’s article In Praise of Amateurs (mostly concerning background detail on Rice’s pentagon tiling findings), pages 140-166.

[11][15]Rice's archival fonds are at the University of Calgary Library, Alberta, Canada, in the Eugène Strens[16] Recreational Mathematics Collection.