In geometry, a shape is said to be anisohedral if it admits a tiling, but no such tiling is isohedral (tile-transitive); that is, in any tiling by that shape there are two tiles that are not equivalent under any symmetry of the tiling. A tiling by an anisohedral tile is referred to as an anisohedral tiling.

Existence

The first part of

Hilbert's eighteenth problem Hilbert's eighteenth problem is one of the 23 Hilbert problems set out in a celebrated list compiled in 1900 by mathematician David Hilbert. It asks three separate questions about lattices and sphere packing in Euclidean space. Symmetry groups i ...

asked whether there exists an anisohedral polyhedron in Euclidean 3-space; Grünbaum and Shephard suggestGrünbaum and Shephard, section 9.6 that Hilbert was assuming that no such tile existed in the plane. Reinhardt answered Hilbert's problem in 1928 by finding examples of such polyhedra, and asserted that his proof that no such tiles exist in the plane would appear soon. However, Heesch then gave an example of an anisohedral tile in the plane in 1935.

Convex tiles

Reinhardt had previously considered the question of anisohedral convex polygons, showing that there were no anisohedral convex hexagons but being unable to show there were no such convex

pentagon In geometry, a pentagon (from the Greek πέντε ''pente'' meaning ''five'' and γωνία ''gonia'' meaning ''angle'') is any five-sided polygon or 5-gon. The sum of the internal angles in a simple pentagon is 540°. A pentagon may be simpl ...

s, while finding the five types of convex pentagon tiling the plane isohedrally. Kershner gave three types of anisohedral convex pentagon in 1968; one of these tiles using only direct isometries without reflections or glide reflections, so answering a question of Heesch.

Isohedral numbers

The problem of anisohedral tiling has been generalised by saying that the isohedral number of a tile is the lowest number orbits (equivalence classes) of tiles in any tiling of that tile under the action of the

symmetry group In group theory, the symmetry group of a geometric object is the group of all transformations under which the object is invariant, endowed with the group operation of composition. Such a transformation is an invertible mapping of the ambient ...

of that tiling, and that a tile with isohedral number ''k'' is ''k''-anisohedral. Berglund asked whether there exist ''k''-anisohedral tiles for all ''k'', giving examples for ''k'' ≤ 4 (examples of 2-anisohedral and 3-anisohedral tiles being previously known, while the 4-anisohedral tile given was the first such published tile). Goodman-Strauss considered this in the context of general questions about how complex the behaviour of a given tile or set of tiles can be, noting a 10-anisohedral example of Myers. Grünbaum and Shephard had previously raised a slight variation on the same question. Socolar showed in 2007 that arbitrarily high isohedral numbers can be achieved in two dimensions if the tile is disconnected, or has coloured edges with constraints on what colours can be adjacent, and in three dimensions with a connected tile without colours, noting that in two dimensions for a connected tile without colours the highest known isohedral number is 10. Joseph Myers has produced a collection of tiles with high isohedral numbers, particularly a polyhexagon with isohedral number 10 (occurring in 20 orbits under translation) and another with isohedral number 9 (occurring in 36 orbits under translation

References

External links

* John Berglund
Anisohedral Tilings Page
* * Joseph Myers
Polyomino, polyhex and polyiamond tiling
{{Tessellation Tessellation