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In geometry, the hexagonal tiling or hexagonal tessellation is a regular tiling of the Euclidean plane, in which exactly three hexagons meet at each vertex. It has Schläfli symbol of {6,3} or t {3,6} (as a truncated triangular tiling).
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]
Although a cube is the only regular polyhedron that admits of tessellation, many non-regular 3-dimensional shapes can tessellate, such as the truncated octahedron. The second part of Hilbert's eighteenth problem asked for a single polyhedron tiling Euclidean 3-space , such that no tiling by it is isohedral (an anisohedral tile).
In plane geometry, the einstein problem asks about the existence of a single prototile that by itself forms an aperiodic set of prototiles; that is, a shape that can tessellate space but only in a nonperiodic way. Such a shape is called an einstein, a word play on ein Stein, German for "one stone". [2]
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.
The snub square tiling, made of two squares and three equilateral triangles around each vertex, has a bilaterally symmetric Cairo tiling as its dual tiling. [13] The Cairo tiling can be formed from the snub square tiling by placing a vertex of the Cairo tiling at the center of each square or triangle of the snub square tiling, and connecting ...
Each subgroup symmetry allows one or more degrees of freedom for irregular forms. Only the g6 subgroup has no degrees of freedom but can be seen as directed edges. Hexagons of symmetry g2, i4, and r12, as parallelogons can tessellate the Euclidean plane by translation. Other hexagon shapes can tile the plane with different orientations.
Like the cube, it can tessellate (or "pack") 3-dimensional space, as a permutohedron. The truncated octahedron was called the "mecon" by Buckminster Fuller. [1] Its dual polyhedron is the tetrakis hexahedron. If the original truncated octahedron has unit edge length, its dual tetrakis hexahedron has edge lengths 9 / 8 √ 2 and 3 / ...