Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Tessellations of euclidean and hyperbolic space may also be considered regular polytopes. Note that an 'n'-dimensional polytope actually tessellates a space of one dimension less. For example, the (three-dimensional) platonic solids tessellate the 'two'-dimensional 'surface' of the sphere.
There are 28 convex examples in Euclidean 3-space, [1] also called the Archimedean honeycombs. A honeycomb is called regular if the group of isometries preserving the tiling acts transitively on flags, where a flag is a vertex lying on an edge lying on a face lying on a cell. Every regular honeycomb is automatically uniform.
If a geometric shape can be used as a prototile to create a tessellation, the shape is said to tessellate or to tile the plane. The Conway criterion is a sufficient, but not necessary, set of rules for deciding whether a given shape tiles the plane periodically without reflections: some tiles fail the criterion, but still tile the plane. [19]
The regular star polyhedra are called the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra and there are four of them, based on the vertex arrangements of the dodecahedron {5,3} and icosahedron {3,5}: As spherical tilings, these star forms overlap the sphere multiple times, called its density, being 3 or 7 for these forms.
Regular tetrahedra alone do not tessellate (fill space), but if alternated with regular octahedra in the ratio of two tetrahedra to one octahedron, they form the alternated cubic honeycomb, which is a tessellation. Some tetrahedra that are not regular, including the Schläfli orthoscheme and the Hill tetrahedron, can tessellate.
Within that plane, every triangle, irrespective of regularity, will tessellate. In contrast, regular pentagons do not tessellate. However, irregular pentagons, with different sides and angles can tessellate. There are 15 irregular convex pentagons that tile the plane. [6] Polyhedra are the three dimensional correlates of polygons.
The original form of Penrose tiling used tiles of four different shapes, but this was later reduced to only two shapes: either two different rhombi, or two different quadrilaterals called kites and darts. The Penrose tilings are obtained by constraining the ways in which these shapes are allowed to fit together in a way that avoids periodic tiling.
In geometry, a bigon, [1] digon, or a 2-gon, is a polygon with two sides and two vertices.Its construction is degenerate in a Euclidean plane because either the two sides would coincide or one or both would have to be curved; however, it can be easily visualised in elliptic space.