Saturday, August 8, 2015

Pentagonal tilings

Do you like pentagons?  How about tilings?  There is a new one on the scene.

Yes, Casey Mann, Jennifer McLoud, and David Von Derau, of the University of Washington–Bothell, found a new pentagonal tiling! 

I saw them speak about this work in April 2015 at the PNW MAA, and they explained how the were searching using all of the ways the angles could sum up. There are a lot of cases when you consider non-edge-to-edge tilings. They turned it into a big algebra problem. As of then, they hadn't found one yet. I'm so pleased to see their effort paid off with such a quirky new tiling.

Want more? http://www.jaapsch.net/tilings/#pentagon

1 comment:

  1. HA! Driving home this afternoon listening to NPR and what is the topic? Tiling the plane and a new pentagon and I thought about how smart I am because I heard it first, days ago even, here. What I really thought was that I knew what it looked like and exactly what they were talking about.

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