Tessellations full#

This basketweave tiling is topologically identical to the Cairo pentagonal tiling, with one side of each rectangle counted as two edges, divided by a vertex on the two neighboring rectangles. All n-dimensional hypercubic honeycombs with Schlafli symbols square tiling with its dual drawn in red. Tilings and honeycombs can also be self-dual. Spiral monohedral tilings include the Voderberg tiling discovered by Hans Voderberg in 1936, whose unit tile is a nonconvex enneagon and the Hirschhorn tiling discovered by Michael Hirschhorn in the 1970s, whose unit tile is an irregular pentagon. They belong to a general class of aperiodic tilings that can be constructed out of self-replicating sets of polygons by using recursion.Ī monohedral tiling is a tessellation in which all tiles are congruent. Penrose tilings using two different polygons are the most famous example of tessellations that create aperiodic patterns. There are regular versus irregular, periodic versus aperiodic, symmetric versus asymmetric, and fractal tessellations, as well as other classifications. Other types of tessellations exist, depending on types of figures and types of pattern. no tile shares a partial side with any other tile.

Tessellations full#

An edge-to-edge tessellation is even less regular: the only requirement is that adjacent tiles only share full sides, i.e. The arrangement of polygons at every vertex point is identical. Only three regular tessellations exist: those made up of equilateral triangles, squares, or hexagons.Ī semiregular tessellation uses a variety of regular polygons there are eight of these. Such a triangle has the same area as the quadrilateral and can be constructed from it by cutting and pasting.Ī regular tessellation is a highly symmetric tessellation made up of congruent regular polygons. We can divide this by one diagonal, and take one half (a triangle) as fundamental domain. Equivalently, we can construct a parallelogram subtended by a minimal set of translation vectors, starting from a rotational center. As fundamental domain we have the quadrilateral. For an asymmetric quadrilateral this tiling belongs to wallpaper group p2. To produce a coloring which does, as many as seven colors may be needed, as in the picture at right.Ĭopies of an arbitrary quadrilateral can form a tessellation with 2-fold rotational centers at the midpoints of all sides, and translational symmetry with as minimal set of translation vectors a pair according to the diagonals of the quadrilateral, or equivalently, one of these and the sum or difference of the two. Note that the coloring guaranteed by the four-color theorem will not in general respect the symmetries of the tessellation. The four color theorem states that for every tessellation of a normal Euclidean plane, with a set of four available colors, each tile can be colored in one color such that no tiles of equal color meet at a curve of positive length. When discussing a tiling that is displayed in colors, to avoid ambiguity one needs to specify whether the colors are part of the tiling or just part of its illustration. (This tiling can be compared to the surface of a torus.) Tiling before coloring, only four colors are needed. If this parallelogram pattern is colored before tiling it over a plane, seven colors are required to ensure each complete parallelogram has a consistent color that is distinct from that of adjacent areas.