ContributionsThe boundary characteristic and the volume of lattice polyhedra

The boundary characteristic — introduced by Ding and Reay — is a functional defined for a given planar tiling which associates with a given lattice figure, some integer. It appeared to be a very useful parameter to determine the area of lattice figures in the planar tilings with congruent regular polygons. The purpose of this paper is to extend the notion of the boundary characteristic to lattice polyhedra in ³. Studying some of its properties we show, in particular, that it can be applied to determine the volume of lattice polyhedra.     

Tiling a Polygon with Two Kinds of Rectangles

We fix two rectangles with integer dimensions. We give a quadratic time algorithm which, given a polygon F as input, produces a tiling of F with translated copies of our rectangles (or indicates that there is no tiling). Moreover, we prove that any pair of tilings can be linked by a sequence of local transformations of tilings, called flips. This study is based on the use of Conway’s tiling groups and extends the results of Kenyon and Kenyon (limited to the case when each rectangle has a side of length 1).     

Semi-equivelar maps on the torus and the Klein bottle are Archimedean

If the face-cycles at all the vertices in a map on a surface are of same type then the map is called semi-equivelar. There are eleven types of Archimedean tilings on the plane. All the Archimedean tilings are semi-equivelar maps. If a map $X$ on the torus is a quotient of an Archimedean tiling on the plane then the map $X$ is semi-equivelar. We show that each semi-equivelar map on the torus or on the Klein bottle is a quotient of an Archimedean tiling on the plane.Vertex-transitive maps are semi-equivelar maps. We know that four types of semi-equivelar maps on the torus are always vertex-transitive and there are examples of other seven types of semi-equivelar maps which are not vertex-transitive. We show that the number of $\mathrm{Aut}\left(Y\right)$-orbits of vertices for any semi-equivelar map $Y$ on the torus is at most six. In fact, the number of orbits is at most three except one type of semi-equivelar maps. Our bounds on the number of orbits are sharp.     

The boundary characteristic and the volume of lattice polyhedra

The boundary characteristic — introduced by Ding and Reay — is a functional defined for a given planar tiling which associates with a given lattice figure, some integer. It appeared to be a very useful parameter to determine the area of lattice figures in the planar tilings with congruent regular polygons. The purpose of this paper is to extend the notion of the boundary characteristic to lattice polyhedra inR³. Studying some of its properties we show, in particular, that it can be applied to determine the volume of lattice polyhedra.     

Realizable Quadruples for Hex-polygons

There are many interesting combinatorial results and problems dealing with lattice polygons, that is, polygons in ℝ² with vertices in the integral lattice ℤ². Geometrically, ℤ² is the set of corners of a tiling of ℝ² by unit squares. Denote by H the set of corners of a tiling of the plane by regular hexagons of unit area and call a polygon P a Hex-polygon or an H-polygon if all vertices of P are in H. Our purpose is to study several combinatorial properties of H-polygons that are analogous to properties of lattice polygons. In particular we aim to find some relationships between the numbers b and i of points from H on the boundary and in the interior of an H-polygon P with the numbers v and c of vertices and the so-called boundary characteristic of P. We also pose three open problems dealing with convex Hex-polygons.     

Partial Cubes and Archimedean Tilings

Some physicists depicted the molecular structure SnCl₂ · 2(H₂O) by a piece of an Archimedean tiling (4.8.8) that is a partial cube. Inspired by this fact, we determine Archimedean tilings whose connected subgraphs are all partial cubes. Actually there are only four Archimedean tilings, (4.4.4.4), (6.6.6), (4.8.8) and (4.6.12), which have this property. Furthermore, we obtain analytical expressions for Wiener numbers of some connected subgraphs of (4.8.8) and (4.6.12) tilings. In addition, we also discuss their asymptotic behaviors.     

Tiling polygons with parallelograms

Under what conditions can a simple polygon be tiled by parallelograms? In this paper we give matching necessary and sufficient conditions on the polygon to be tilable and characterize the set of possible tilings. We also provide an efficient algorithm for constructing a tiling.     

Orbits of edge-to-edge tilings by equilateral triangles,squares and regular hexagons

An edge-to-edge tiling of the Euclidian plane by equilateral triangles, squares and regular hexagons is said to be of type (t,s,h) if there are exactly t orbits of triangles, s orbits of squares and h orbits of hexagons under the symmetry group of the tiling. We prove that there exist tilings of type (t,s,h) for every t 92, s 2, h 43. We completely determine the values of t and h for which tilings of type (t,1,h) exist.     

Tilings of Convex Polygons with Congruent Triangles

By the spectrum of a polygon A we mean the set of triples (??,??,??) such that A can be dissected into congruent triangles of angles ??,??,??. We propose a technique for finding the spectrum of every convex polygon. Our method is based on the following classification. A tiling is called regular if there are two angles of the triangles, ?? and ?? such that at every vertex of the tiling the number of triangles having angle ?? equals the number of triangles having angle ??. Otherwise the tiling is irregular. We list all pairs (A,T) such that A is a convex polygon and T is a triangle that tiles A regularly. The list of triangles tiling A irregularly is always finite, and can be obtained, at least in principle, by considering the system of equations satisfied by the angles, examining the conjugate tilings, and comparing the sides and the area of the triangles to those of A. Using this method we characterize the convex polygons with infinite spectrum, and determine the spectrum of the regular triangle, the square, all rectangles, and the regular N-gons with N large enough.     

Quasiperiodic tilings and quasicrystals

One gets quasiperiodic tilings by projecting a periodic lattice from a space of a larger number of dimensions. One can choose a fundamental domain of the lattice in various ways — this leads to different quasi-periodic tilings. Thus, one can generalize Penrose's nonperiodic tiling of the plane and the same for space filling.Translated from Zapiski Nauchnykh Seminarov Leningradskogo Otdeleniya Matematicheskogo Instituta im. V. A. Steklova AN SSSR, Vol. 155, pp. 116–135, 1986.Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to M. M. Skriganov for discussions.     

The 2-homeotoxal tilings of the plane and the 2-sphere

A complete enumeration is obtained of the finite tilings of the 2-sphere and of the infinite tilings of the plane which are normal and admit two transitivity classes of edges under topological automorphisms of the tiling. Every type is found to be representable by a tiling in which the edges form two transitivity classes under isometric symmetries of the tiling.     

Generating Function of the Tilings of an Aztec Rectangle with Holes

We consider a generating function of the domino tilings of an Aztec rectangle with several unit squares removed from the boundary. Our generating function involves two statistics: the rank of the tiling and half number of vertical dominoes as in the Aztec diamond theorem by Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen and Propp. In addition, our work deduces a combinatorial explanation for an interesting connection between the number of lozenge tilings of a semihexagon and the number of domino tilings of an Aztec rectangle.     

Spotlight Tiling

This article introduces spotlight tiling, a type of covering which is similar to tiling. The distinguishing aspects of spotlight tiling are that the “tiles” have elastic size, and that the order of placement is significant. Spotlight tilings are decompositions, or coverings, and can be considered dynamic as compared to typical static tiling methods. A thorough examination of spotlight tilings of rectangles is presented, including the distribution of such tilings according to size, and how the directions of the spotlights themselves are distributed. The spotlight tilings of several other regions are studied, and suggest that further analysis of spotlight tilings will continue to yield elegant results and enumerations.     

On the enumeration of Archimedean polyhedra in the Lobachevsky space

We describe the class of Archimedean polyhedra in the three-dimensional Lobachevsky space, which technically reduces to studying Archimedean tilings of the Lobachevsky plane. We analyze the possibility of obtaining Archimedean tilings by methods that are usually applied on the sphere and in the Euclidean plane. It is pointed out that such tilings can be constructed by using certain types of Fedorov groups in the Lobachevsky plane. We propose a general approach to the problem of classifying Archimedean tilings of the Lobachevsky plane.     

An optimal algorithm to generate tilings

We produce an algorithm that is optimal with respect to both space and execution time to generate all the lozenge (or domino) tilings of a hole-free, general-shape domain given as input.We first recall some useful results, namely the distributive lattice structure of the space of tilings and Thurston's algorithm for constructing a particular tiling. We then describe our algorithm and study its complexity.     

Tilings of orthogonal polygons with similar rectangles or triangles

In this paper we prove two results about tilings of orthogonal polygons. (1) LetP be an orthogonal polygon with rational vertex coordinates and letR(u) be a rectangle with side lengthsu and 1. An orthogonal polygonP can be tiled with similar copies ofR(u) if and only ifu is algebraic and the real part of each of its conjugates is positive; (2) Laczkovich proved that if a triangle Δ tiles a rectangle then either Δ is a right triangle or the angles of Δ are rational multiples of π. We generalize the result of Laczkovich to orthogonal polygons.     

Equivalence of Self-similar and Pseudo-self-similar Tiling Spaces in ℝ<Superscript>2</Superscript>

Given a tiling T, one may form a related tiling, called the derived Voronoi tiling of T, based on a patch of tiles in T. Similarly, for a tiling space X, one can identify a patch which appears regularly in all tilings in X, and form a derived Voronoi space of tilings, based on that patch.     

Moving Out the Edges of a Lattice Polygon

We review previous work of (mainly) Koelman, Haase and Schicho, and Poonen and Rodriguez-Villegas on the dual operations of (i) taking the interior hull and (ii) moving out the edges of a two-dimensional lattice polygon. We show how the latter operation naturally gives rise to an algorithm for enumerating lattice polygons by their genus. We then report on an implementation of this algorithm, by means of which we produce the list of all lattice polygons (up to equivalence) whose genus is contained in {1,…,30}. In particular, we obtain the number of inequivalent lattice polygons for each of these genera. As a byproduct, we prove that the minimal possible genus for a lattice 15-gon is 45.