The quaquaversal tiling is a nonperiodic tiling of the euclidean 3-space introduced by John Conway and Charles Radin. The basic solid tiles are half prisms arranged in a pattern that relies essentially on their previous construct, the pinwheel tiling. The rotations relating these tiles belong to the group G(6,4) generated by two rotations of order 6 and 4 whose axes are perpendicular to each other. These rotations are dense in SO(3).
John Horton Conway was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
A pentomino is a polyomino of order 5, that is, a polygon in the plane made of 5 equal-sized squares connected edge-to-edge. When rotations and reflections are not considered to be distinct shapes, there are 12 different free pentominoes. When reflections are considered distinct, there are 18 one-sided pentominoes. When rotations are also considered distinct, there are 63 fixed pentominoes.
A polyomino is a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge. It is a polyform whose cells are squares. It may be regarded as a finite subset of the regular square tiling.
A tessellation or tiling of a flat surface is the covering of a plane using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellations can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries.
A wallpaper group is a mathematical classification of a two-dimensional repetitive pattern, based on the symmetries in the pattern. Such patterns occur frequently in architecture and decorative art, especially in textiles and tiles as well as wallpaper.
An aperiodic tiling is a non-periodic tiling with the additional property that it does not contain arbitrarily large periodic patches. A set of tile-types is aperiodic if copies of these tiles can form only non-periodic tilings. The Penrose tilings are the best-known examples of aperiodic tilings.
In geometry, the truncated trihexagonal tiling is one of eight semiregular tilings of the Euclidean plane. There are one square, one hexagon, and one dodecagon on each vertex. It has Schläfli symbol of tr{3,6}.
In geometry, the rhombitrihexagonal tiling is a semiregular tiling of the Euclidean plane. There are one triangle, two squares, and one hexagon on each vertex. It has Schläfli symbol of rr{3,6}.
In geometry, the snub hexagonal tiling is a semiregular tiling of the Euclidean plane. There are four triangles and one hexagon on each vertex. It has Schläfli symbol of sr{3,6}. The snub tetrahexagonal tiling is a related hyperbolic tiling with Schläfli symbol sr{4,6}.
In geometry, pinwheel tilings are non-periodic tilings defined by Charles Radin and based on a construction due to John Conway. They are the first known non-periodic tilings to each have the property that their tiles appear in infinitely many orientations.
In geometry, an Ammann–Beenker tiling is a nonperiodic tiling which can be generated either by an aperiodic set of prototiles as done by Robert Ammann in the 1970s, or by the cut-and-project method as done independently by F. P. M. Beenker. Because all tilings obtained with the tiles are non-periodic, Ammann–Beenker tilings are considered aperiodic tilings. They are one of the five sets of tilings discovered by Ammann and described in Tilings and Patterns.
A Penrose tiling is an example of an aperiodic tiling. Here, a tiling is a covering of the plane by non-overlapping polygons or other shapes, and aperiodic means that shifting any tiling with these shapes by any finite distance, without rotation, cannot produce the same tiling. However, despite their lack of translational symmetry, Penrose tilings may have both reflection symmetry and fivefold rotational symmetry. Penrose tilings are named after mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who investigated them in the 1970s.
In geometry, Keller's conjecture is the conjecture that in any tiling of n-dimensional Euclidean space by identical hypercubes, there are two hypercubes that share an entire (n − 1)-dimensional face with each other. For instance, in any tiling of the plane by identical squares, some two squares must share an entire edge, as they do in the illustration.
A Pythagorean tiling or two squares tessellation is a tiling of a Euclidean plane by squares of two different sizes, in which each square touches four squares of the other size on its four sides. Many proofs of the Pythagorean theorem are based on it, explaining its name. It is commonly used as a pattern for floor tiles. When used for this, it is also known as a hopscotch pattern or pinwheel pattern, but it should not be confused with the mathematical pinwheel tiling, an unrelated pattern.
Charles Lewis Radin is an American mathematician, known for his work on aperiodic tilings and in particular for defining the pinwheel tiling and the quaquaversal tiling.
Circle Limit III is a woodcut made in 1959 by Dutch artist M. C. Escher, in which "strings of fish shoot up like rockets from infinitely far away" and then "fall back again whence they came".
In the mathematical theory of tessellations, the Conway criterion, named for the English mathematician John Horton Conway, is a fast way to identify many prototiles that tile the plane; it consists of the following requirements: The tile must be a closed topological disk with six consecutive points A, B, C, D, E, and F on the boundary such that:
In plane geometry, the einstein problem asks about the existence of a single prototile that by itself forms an aperiodic set of prototiles, that is, a shape that can tessellate space, but only in a nonperiodic way. Such a shape is called an "einstein", a play on the German words ein Stein, meaning one tile. Depending on the particular definitions of nonperiodicity and the specifications of what sets may qualify as tiles and what types of matching rules are permitted, the problem is either open or solved. The einstein problem can be seen as a natural extension of the second part of Hilbert's eighteenth problem, which asks for a single polyhedron that tiles Euclidean 3-space, but such that no tessellation by this polyhedron is isohedral. Such anisohedral tiles were found by Karl Reinhardt in 1928, but these anisohedral tiles all tile space periodically.
Quasicrystals and Geometry is a book on quasicrystals and aperiodic tiling by Marjorie Senechal, published in 1995 by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0-521-37259-3).
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