Questions tagged [tiling]
For questions about mathematical tiling.
295 questions
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Can a row of five equilateral triangles tile a big equilateral triangle?
Can rotations and translations of this shape
perfectly tile some equilateral triangle?
I originally asked this on math.stackexchange where it was well received and we made some good progress. Here's ...
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Does every polyomino tile R^n for some n?
This is a question posed by Adam Chalcraft. I am posting it here because I think it deserves wider circulation, and because maybe someone already knows the answer.
A polyomino is usually defined to ...
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Is there mathematical significance to the LaGuardia floor tiles?
I noticed that the new terminal at LaGuardia Airport (in New York) has an intriguing design for the tiles on at least one of their floor areas. It bears a superficial resemblance to aperiodic tilings ...
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Can the sphere be partitioned into small congruent cells?
On the unit $2$-sphere ${\mathbb S}^2$ furnished with the geodesic distance, a subset homeomorphic to a planar disk is called a cell. A finite family of cells is a tiling if their interiors are ...
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Lecture notes by Thurston on tiling
I am looking for a copy of the following
W. Thurston, Groups, tilings, and finite state automata, AMS Colloquium Lecture Notes.
I see that a lot of papers in the tiling literature refer to it but I ...
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Does any set of dominoes tile some common figure?
Let $D_1,\dots,D_n \subset \mathbb{Z}^2$ be two-point sets, i.e. 'dominoes' (unlike common dominoes, these are not necessarily connected, but I couldn't come up with a better name).
Does there always ...
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Tiling the plane with incongruent isosceles triangles
It is not difficult to tile the plane with incongruent triangles.
One could tile with equilateral triangles, and then partition
each equilateral into three triangles, displacing their common
...
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Can we three-color a tiling of the plane with Smith, Meyers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss's einstein?
The tiling world is a bit aflutter recently with the drop of Smith, Meyers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss's paper showing an einstein - a simply-connected polygon - that must aperiodically tile the ...
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Tiling a square with rectangles
Is it possible to completely tile a square with different rectangles of integer sides but all with the same area?
The original problem, not requiring integer sides for rectangles, was proposed by Joe ...
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tiling a rectangle with the smallest number of squares
This is based on another thread. For $m,n\in \mathbb N$, let $f(m,n)$ be the minimum number of squares with integer sides needed to tile a $m\times n$ rectangle. Recently, a table of values for $n\le ...
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Fair cutting of the plane with lines
An infinite countable family $\cal{L}$ of straight lines in the plane $\mathbb{R}^2$ forms a fair cutting of the plane if the following conditions are satisfied:
$\bullet$ No circle intersects ...
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Which unfoldings of the hypercube tile 3-space: How to check for isometric space-fillers?
Recently Mark McClure constructed and displayed
the 261 unfoldings of the hypercube (tesseract)
in response to the question,
"3D models of the unfoldings of the hypercube?":
The first 9 unfoldings ...
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Terrible tilers for covering the plane
Let $C$ be a convex shape in the plane.
Your task is to cover the plane with copies of $C$, each under any rigid motion.
My question is essentially: What is the worst $C$, the shape that forces the ...
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Polyomino that can tile itself
Find all polyomino $P$ such that we can tile $nP$ with $n^2$ copies of $P$ for all $n\in \mathbb{N}$. ($nP$ is a polynomino similar to $P$ with scale factor $n$)
I conjecture that there are only $4$ ...
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Polyomino that can cover an arbitrarily large square but not the entire plane
https://userpages.monmouth.com/~colonel/nrectcover/index.html
For a polyomino with no holes that cannot tile the plane, we may ask what are the maximal rectangles and infinite strips that it can ...
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Can a unit square be cut into rectangles that tile a rectangle with irrational sides?
For arbitrary positive integers $m$ and $n$, if we dissect a unit square into an $m\times n$ rectangular grid of $1/m\times 1/n$ rectangles, we can reassemble these $mn$ rectangles into an $n/m\times ...
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What can be tiled by T-tetrominoes?
The T-tetromino is a T-shaped figure made of four unit squares.
An $m\times n$ rectangle can be tiled by T-tetrominoes if and only if both $m$ and $n$ are multiples of 4. This was proved in a 1965 ...
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Which unfoldings of the $d$-dimensional hypercube tile $(d{-}1)$-space?
A six year old question,
Which unfoldings of the hypercube tile $3$-space?, has just been answered by
Moritz Firsching:
All $261$ unfoldings tile space!
So now we know:
For $d=2$, the unfolding of ...
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Covering of a surface of a cube $n\times n \times n$ by pieces of paper $1\times 6$
When I was too young one of my problems was in the list of problems of All-Russian Olympiad. The problem is the following:
Problem. We have a surface of a cube $n\times n \times n$ such that each ...
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Aperiodic monotile without reflections?
The recently discovered amazing aperiodic monotile (or "einstein") of David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss tiles the plane only if reflections of the ...
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Rhombus tilings with more than three directions
The point of this question is to construct a list of references on the following subject: Fix vectors $v_1$, $v_2$, ..., $v_g$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$, all lying in a half plane in that cyclic order. I am ...
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Monomer-Dimer tatami tilings need better relationships with other math. Summary of results
A monomer-dimer tiling of a rectangular grid with $r$ rows and $c$ columns satisfies the tatami condition if no four tiles meet at any point. (Or you can think of it as the removal of a matching from ...
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Does every 5-celled animal tile the plane?
An animal in the plane is a finite set of grid-aligned unit squares in $\mathbb{R}^2$. (The definition is the same as a polyomino, but where we relax the connectivity requirement.) One may ...
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Tiling rectangle with trominoes — an invariant
There are two types of trominoes, straight shapes and L-shaped. Suppose a rectangle $R$ admits at least one tiling using trominoes, with an even number of L-trominoes.
EDIT: we do not admit ALL ...
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Smallest tile to tessellate the hyperbolic plane
Is it known what the smallest tile (in terms of area) that can tessellate the hyperbolic plane is? In particular, it should tessellate the plane by itself.
I think it will be a Triangle group, but I'...
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"a shape that ... lies halfway between a square and a circle"
An article in the
Notices of the AMS, Volume 61, Issue 10, 2014
(PDF download link),
on Khot's Unique Games Conjecture, says this:
Another group ... found a
shape that in a certain sense lies ...
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Non-enumerative proof that, in average, less than 50% of tiles in domino tiling of 2-by-n rectangle are vertical?
Is there a non-enumerative proof that, in average, less than 50% of tiles in domino tiling of 2-by-n rectangle are vertical?
It is a nice exercise with rational generating functions (or equivalently, ...
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Can you see through a cannonball packing?
More precisely, in a regular sphere packing, either the
HCP or FCC lattice packing,
does there exist a line $L$ disjoint from every sphere,
i.e., not touching any sphere?
If so, one could "look ...
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Can every tromino (including those with gaps) tile the plane?
I've generalized trominos to include "gaps", i.e. they are formed by removing all but $3$ squares from an $n$-omino where $n$ is finite.
The generalized trominos pictured above can tile the plane ...
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Dividing a square into 5 equal squares
Can you divide one square paper into five equal squares?
You have a scissor and glue. You can measure and cut and then attach as well. Only condition is You can't waste any paper.
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How hard is it to tell when a finite set tiles the integers?
Given a nonempty set $B$ of integers between 1 and $n$, we wish to determine whether or not $\mathbb{Z}$ can be tiled with translates of $B$ (that is, covered by disjoint translates of $B$). I know an ...
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Mathematics of quasicrystals
I want to study quasicrystals from mathematical point of view, but I'm having hard time finding materials about it. If you could suggest me some books, articles or papers, I would be glad.
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♢ ⧫ ⬠: the fourth kind of Penrose tiling?
It’s known that Penrose tilings have several implementations that are mutually locally derivable; but the sources (such as en.wikipedia) list no more than three essentially different variants. There ...
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Higher dimensional generalization of: Any quadrilateral tiles the plane?
Any (non-self-intersecting) quadrilateral tiles the plane.
(MathWorld image.)
Q. What is the strongest known generalization of this statement to higher dimensions?
I.e., $\mathbb{R}^d$ ...
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Decidability of tiling R^2
Does there exist a closed curve, with finite area and finite circumference, of which it is undecidable (in an axiomatic system where it is constructable) whether it can tile the plane?
I know the ...
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The sparsest planar net that captures every unit segment
Let $\cal C = \lbrace C_i \rbrace$ be a collection
of rectifiable curves in the plane with the property that
every unit-length segment meets at least one curve
in at least one point.
Call such a ...
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Aperiodic monotile in $\mathbb{R}$
Motivation. Recently a group of researchers found an aperiodic monotile in $\mathbb{R}^2$, answering a long-standing question. There are many results in higher dimensions, so let's explore the lower ...
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Are Penrose tilings universal? Do aperiodic universal tilings exist?
Consider a tiling of the plane using tiles of at least two types (e.g, a Penrose tiling such as that shown at the bottom of this question, which tiles the plane with two types of tiles). List the tile ...
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Is "Escherian metamorphosis" always possible?
$\DeclareMathOperator\int{int}\DeclareMathOperator\diam{diam}\DeclareMathOperator\area{area}\DeclareMathOperator\cl{cl}\DeclareMathOperator\ran{ran}\DeclareMathOperator\dom{dom}$This is a tweaked ...
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Tiling a rectangle with all simply connected polyominoes of fixed size
For which values of $n$ can we tile some rectangle with one copy of each free simply-connected $n$-omino (that is, each polyomino with $n$ squares that has no holes)?
It appears that it is possible ...
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How to characterize the regularity of a polygon?
In my research, I've recently started to play with Voronoi tessellations. I currently have a Python code that creates the tessellation and I am trying to color the polygonal regions according to their ...
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Random walk on a Penrose tiling
Pólya proved that a random walk on $\mathbb{Z}^2$ almost surely returns to the
origin, or, equivalently, returns to the origin infinitely often.
It was subsequently established that in $\mathbb{Z}^3$, ...
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Dividing a polyhedron into two similar copies
The paper Dividing a polygon into two similar polygons proves that there are only three families of polygons that are irrep-2-tiles (can be subdivided into similar copies of the original).
Right ...
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Are there irregular tilings by L-polyominoes?
I wonder if one can tile the plane with an order-$n$ L-polyomino
in a fundamentally irregular manner.
I seek help in defining what should constitute "irregular."
An L-polyomino of order $n \...
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Tiling survey that updates "Tilings and patterns"?
Can anyone suggest a survey (or surveys) that provides an update to Tilings and patterns by Grunbaum and Shepard? If there's a more recent book, that would be fantastic, but I don't see one.
I am ...
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Bicoloring of $\mathbb{N}^2$, avoiding set of patterns, is the maximal limit density rational?
Consider a bi-coloring of $\mathbb{N}^2$, (black and white), where we wish to maximize the limit (limsup) of the density of black squares in $[n] \times [n]$ as $n \to \infty$. Here, we identify each ...
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Relation Between Truncated Braid Groups and Regular Tilings of the Complex and Hyperbolic Plane
This is perhaps a vague question, but hopefully there exists literature on the subject. The question is motivated by an answer I gave to this question on math.SE.
There exists a rather remarkable ...
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How can one construct a four-coloring of a tiling of the plane with Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss's aperiodic monotile?
This is motivated by the new paper of Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss, wherein they define the existence of an aperiodic monotile. Clearly their tiling is not three-colorable, so we have ...
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What exact number of domino tilings cannot be realizable?
Inspired by some other questions, (this and this),
I wonder what numbers $n$ there are that satisfy
$$p(n)=\text{there is no region that admits exactly } n \text{ domino tilings}.$$
If this is true, $...
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Arctic regions in higher dimensional zonotopes
Same way as the two dimensional tilings by rhombi come from minimal surfaces in a $D$ dimensional cubical lattice as mentioned in this answer, one can consider higher dimensional zonotopes tiled by ...
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