Tessellation
Introduction to tessellations

Mathematicians use some technical terms when discussing tilings. An edge is the intersection between two bordering tiles; it is often a straight line. A vertex is the point of intersection of three or more bordering tiles. Using these terms, an isogonal or vertex-transitive tiling is a tiling where every vertex point is identical; that is, the arrangement of polygons about each vertex is the same. The fundamental region is a shape such as a rectangle that is repeated to form the tessellation. For example, a regular tessellation of the plane with squares has a meeting of four squares at every vertex.

The sides of the polygons are not necessarily identical to the edges of the tiles. An edge-to-edge tiling is any polygonal tessellation where adjacent tiles only share one full side, i.e., no tile shares a partial side or more than one side with any other tile. In an edge-to-edge tiling, the sides of the polygons and the edges of the tiles are the same. The familiar "brick wall" tiling is not edge-to-edge because the long side of each rectangular brick is shared with two bordering bricks.

A normal tiling is a tessellation for which every tile is topologically equivalent to a disk, the intersection of any two tiles is a connected set or the empty set, and all tiles are uniformly bounded. This means that a single circumscribing radius and a single inscribing radius can be used for all the tiles in the whole tiling; the condition disallows tiles that are pathologically long or thin.

A monohedral tiling is a tessellation in which all tiles are congruent; it has only one prototile. A particularly interesting type of monohedral tessellation is the spiral monohedral tiling. The first spiral monohedral tiling was discovered by Heinz Voderberg in 1936; the Voderberg tiling has a unit tile that is a nonconvex enneagon. The Hirschhorn tiling, published by Michael D. Hirschhorn and D. C. Hunt in 1985, is a pentagon tiling using irregular pentagons: regular pentagons cannot tile the Euclidean plane as the internal angle of a regular pentagon, 3 π / 5, is not a divisor of 2 π.

An isohedral tiling is a special variation of a monohedral tiling in which all tiles belong to the same transitivity class, that is, all tiles are transforms of the same prototile under the symmetry group of the tiling. If a prototile admits a tiling, but no such tiling is isohedral, then the prototile is called anisohedral and forms anisohedral tilings.

A regular tessellation is a highly symmetric, edge-to-edge tiling made up of regular polygons, all of the same shape. There are only three regular tessellations: those made up of equilateral triangles, squares, or regular hexagons. All three of these tilings are isogonal and monohedral.

A semi-regular (or Archimedean) tessellation uses more than one type of regular polygon in an isogonal arrangement. There are eight semi-regular tilings (or nine if the mirror-image pair of tilings counts as two). These can be described by their vertex configuration; for example, a semi-regular tiling using squares and regular octagons has the vertex configuration 4.8 (each vertex has one square and two octagons). Many non-edge-to-edge tilings of the Euclidean plane are possible, including the family of Pythagorean tilings, tessellations that use two (parameterised) sizes of square, each square touching four squares of the other size. An edge tessellation is one in which each tile can be reflected over an edge to take up the position of a neighbouring tile, such as in an array of equilateral or isosceles triangles.
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