If you use a combination of more than one regular polygon to tile the plane, then it's called a "semi-regular" tessellation. The mathematics to explain this is a little complicated, so we won't look at it here So what's unique to those 3 shapes (triangle, square and hexagon)? As it turns out, the key here is that the internal angles of each of these three is an exact divisor of 360 (internal angle of triangle is 60, that of square is 90, and for a hexagon is 120). You can see that there is a gap and that's not allowed. Let's try with pentagons and see what shape we come up with. You may wonder why other shapes won't work. Let me show you examples of these two here. What are the other two? They are triangles and hexagons.
Of course, you would have guessed that one is a square. Each vertex (the points where the corners of the tiles meet) should look the same.All the tiles must be the same shape and size and must be regular polygons (that means all sides are the same length).
The tessellation must cover a plane (or an infinite floor) without any gaps or any overlaps.There are only three rules to be followed when doing a "regular tessellation" of a plane If you use only one kind of polygon to tile the entire plane - that's called a "Regular Tessellation"Īs it turns out, there are only three possible polygons that can be used here. There are different kinds of tessellations – the ones of most interest are tessellations created using polygons. The word “Tiling” is also commonly used to refer to "tessellations". Of course, when we are talking about floors, the shapes used to cover it are mostly rectangles or squares (in fact, the word " tessellation" comes from the Latin word tessella - which means " small square"). The one difference here is that technically a plane is infinite in length and width so it's like a floor that goes on forever. That is a good example of a "tessellation". And you'll notice that the floor is covered with some tiles or marbles of different shapes. That is a flat surface - called a "plane" in mathematical terms. To explain it in simpler terms – consider the floor of your house. Hunt using an irregular pentagon (shown on the right).A tessellation is simply is a set of figures that can cover a flat surface leaving no gaps. Another spiral tiling was published 1985 by Michael D. The first such pattern was discovered by Heinz Voderberg in 1936 and used a concave 11-sided polygon (shown on the left). Lu, a physicist at Harvard, metal quasicrystals have "unusually high thermal and electrical resistivities due to the aperiodicity" of their atomic arrangements.Īnother set of interesting aperiodic tessellations is spirals. The geometries within five-fold symmetrical aperiodic tessellations have become important to the field of crystallography, which since the 1980s has given rise to the study of quasicrystals. According to ArchNet, an online architectural library, the exterior surfaces "are covered entirely with a brick pattern of interlacing pentagons." An early example is Gunbad-i Qabud, an 1197 tomb tower in Maragha, Iran. The patterns were used in works of art and architecture at least 500 years before they were discovered in the West. Medieval Islamic architecture is particularly rich in aperiodic tessellation. These tessellations do not have repeating patterns. Notice how each gecko is touching six others. The following "gecko" tessellation, inspired by similar Escher designs, is based on a hexagonal grid. By their very nature, they are more interested in the way the gate is opened than in the garden that lies behind it." In doing so, they have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. This further inspired Escher, who began exploring deeply intricate interlocking tessellations of animals, people and plants.Īccording to Escher, "Crystallographers have … ascertained which and how many ways there are of dividing a plane in a regular manner. His brother directed him to a 1924 scientific paper by George Pólya that illustrated the 17 ways a pattern can be categorized by its various symmetries. According to James Case, a book reviewer for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), in 1937, Escher shared with his brother sketches from his fascination with 11 th- and 12 th-century Islamic artwork of the Iberian Peninsula. The most famous practitioner of this is 20 th-century artist M.C. Escher & modified monohedral tessellationsĪ unique art form is enabled by modifying monohedral tessellations. A dual of a regular tessellation is formed by taking the center of each shape as a vertex and joining the centers of adjacent shapes.
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