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Marcos, Romar A. MATH 100 1:30-3:30

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Salem, Omar
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Tessellation: The Geometry of Tiles, Honeycombs and M.C.

Escher
Honeycombs, some bathroom floors and designs by artist M.C. Escher have something in common:
they are composed of repeating patterns of the same shape without any overlaps or gaps. This type of
pattern is called tiling, or tessellation.

The word "tessellate" means to form or arrange small squares in a checkered or mosaic pattern,
according to Drexel University. It comes from the Greek tesseres, which means "four." The first tilings
were made from square tiles. As an art form, tessellation is particularly rich in mathematics, with ties to
geometry, topology and group theory. Cultures ranging from Irish and Arabic to Indian and Chinese
have all practiced tiling at various levels of complexity. Let's explore the wide variety of tessellations we
find in nature, functional design and art.

Regular tessellations
In mathematical terms, "regular" describes any shape that has all equal sides and equal angles. There
are three regular shapes that make up regular tessellations: the equilateral triangle, the square and the
regular hexagon. For example, a regular hexagon is used in the pattern of a honeycomb, the nesting
structure of the honeybee.

Figure 1 Equilateral triangles, squares and regular hexagons make up regular tessellations.

Semi-regular tessellations
Semi-regular tessellations are made of more than one kind of regular polygon. Within the limit of the
same shapes surrounding each vertex (the points where the corners meet), there are eight such
tessellations. Each semi-regular tessellation is named for the number of sides of the shapes
surrounding each vertex. For example, for the first tiling below, each vertex is composed of the point of
a triangle (3 sides), a hexagon (6), another triangle (3) and another hexagon (6), so it is called 3.6.3.6.
Sometimes these tessellations are described as "Archimedean" in honor of the third-century B.C. Greek
mathematician.

Figure 2 Semi-regular tessellations are made of combinations of different shapes.

Monohedral tessellations
"Mono" means "one" and "-hedral" means "shape"; so monohedral tessellations are made up of only
one shape, though the shape may be rotated or flipped. In the language of mathematics, the shapes in
such a pattern are described as congruent. Every triangle (three-sided shape) and every quadrilateral
(four-sided shape) is capable of tessellation in at least one way, though a select few can tessellate in
more than one way. A few examples are shown below:

Figure 3 Monohedral tessellations are made of one shape that is rotated or flipped to form different patterns.

According to mathematician Eric W. Weisstein of Wolfram Research's MathWorld, for pentagons, there
are currently 14 known classes of shapes that will tessellate, and only three for hexagons. Whether
there are more classes remains an unsolved problem of mathematics. As for shapes with seven or
more sides, no such polygons tessellate unless they have an angle greater than 180 degrees. Such a
polygon is described as concave because it has an indentation.
A few examples of pentagonal tessellations are shown below. The 14 classes of pentagonal tessellation
can all be generated at the Wolfram Demonstration Project.

Figure 4 A few examples of pentagonal tessellations. There are only 14 known patterns that can be made.

Duals
There's a deeper connection running through many of these geometric tessellations. A lot of them are
"duals" of one another. According to Branko Grünbaum, author of "Tilings and Patterns" (Freeman,
1987), to create a tessellation's dual, draw a dot in the center of each shape, connect each dot to each
of the neighboring shape's dots, and erase the original pattern. Below are some examples of
tessellations and their duals:

Figure 5 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.
M.C. Escher & modified monohedral tessellations
A unique art form is enabled by modifying monohedral tessellations. The most famous practitioner of
this is 20th-century artist M.C. Escher. 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 11th- and 12th-century Islamic artwork of the Iberian Peninsula. 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. This further inspired Escher, who began exploring deeply intricate interlocking
tessellations of animals, people and plants.

According to Escher, "Crystallographers have … ascertained which and how many ways there are of
dividing a plane in a regular manner. In doing so, they have opened the gate leading to an extensive
domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. By their very nature, they are more
interested in the way the gate is opened than in the garden that lies behind it."

The following "gecko" tessellation, inspired by similar Escher designs, is based on a hexagonal grid.
Notice how each gecko is touching six others.

Figure 6 A tessellation of geckos, inspired by the designs of M.C. Escher.

Aperiodic tessellations
Not all tessellations repeat. Such a pattern (if it can be called that) is described as "aperiodic." Below
are three versions of Penrose Tiling, named after English mathematical physicist Rodger Penrose, who
first published such patterns in 1974 at the University of Oxford. These patterns exhibit five-fold
symmetry, a property that is not found in any periodic (repeating) pattern.
 Figure 7 These tessellations do not have repeating patterns. They are called aperiodic.

Medieval Islamic architecture is particularly rich in aperiodic tessellation. The patterns were used in works
of art and architecture at least 500 years before they were discovered in the West. An early example is
Gunbad-i Qabud, an 1197 tomb tower in Maragha, Iran. According to ArchNet, an online architectural
library, the exterior surfaces "are covered entirely with a brick pattern of interlacing pentagons."

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
Peter J. Lu, a physicist at Harvard, metal quasicrystals have "unusually high thermal and electrical
resistivities due to the aperiodicity" of their atomic arrangements.

Another set of interesting aperiodic tessellations is spirals. The first such pattern was discovered by
Heinz Voderberg in 1936 and used a concave 11-sided polygon (shown on the left). Another spiral
tiling was published 1985 by Michael D. Hirschhorn and D.C. Hunt using an irregular pentagon (shown
on the right).

Figure 8 Examples of spiral tessellations

Reference: Tessellation: The Geometry of Tiles, Honeycombs and M.C. Escher by Robert Coolman, Live
Science Contributor | March 3, 2015