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I was looking at this neat page on logarithmic spiral tilings when a question popped up:

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/symmetry/log-spir.htm

It seems that in all of the tilings shown, the area of each tile is exponentially increasing as a function of the distance to the origin. Are there any radial- or spiral-type tilings (or "tiling-like" configurations) in which the area of each tile is a polynomial function of the distance to the origin, say $r^{1/2}$ or $r^2$? I don't require similarity of shapes or anything, just a simple way to fill the plane with shapes possessing (or approximately possessing) this property. I guess it would be nice if the shapes stay reasonable rounded and convex (i.e. not really long and skinny).

edited Dec 10 2011 at 21:22

asked Dec 10 2011 at 21:11

Joel Ford
93●3

Obviously, one can do a tiling with parallelograms (or triangle, or anything one can make a parallelogram from) and any rate of growth. But I do not see any other shapes. – ε-δ Dec 10 2011 at 21:30

Joseph O'Rourke · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-11 02:10:27Z UTC

5

Grunbaum and Shephard book cover
See Section 9.5, "Spiral Tilings," p.512ff. These remarkable tilings go back to H. Voderberg in the 1930's.

edited Dec 11 2011 at 2:10

answered Dec 10 2011 at 21:57

Joseph O'Rourke
44.1k●1●50●216

	In these tilings the size does not grow... – Anton Petrunin Dec 11 2011 at 3:25
	Yes, my point was that exponential growth in the OP's examples is not essential. And I guess $f(r)=1$ is technically polynomial growth! :-) – Joseph O'Rourke Dec 11 2011 at 14:10
	No, $f(r)=\exp(cr)$ with $c=0$ is exponential growth :) – Piero D'Ancona Dec 11 2011 at 16:17
	@Piero: Ha! Touché! – Joseph O'Rourke Dec 11 2011 at 17:22

Radial tilings with variable area ratios

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