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Aperiodic Monotile (parametric) — image 1
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Aperiodic Monotile (parametric)

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Model information

Category
Math
License
Creative Commons — Public Domain

Update: Added options for marking top and/or bottom of tiles with Truchet-tile like arcs.

A jigsaw puzzle made of these mono tiles could be really insane.

 

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This tile is from:

An aperiodic monotile

David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, Chaim Goodman-Strauss

A longstanding open problem asks for an aperiodic monotile, also known as an "einstein": a shape that admits tilings of the plane, but never periodic tilings. We answer this problem for topological disk tiles by exhibiting a continuum of combinatorially equivalent aperiodic polygons. We first show that a representative example, the "hat" polykite, can form clusters called "metatiles", for which substitution rules can be defined. Because the metatiles admit tilings of the plane, so too does the hat. We then prove that generic members of our continuum of polygons are aperiodic, through a new kind of geometric incommensurability argument. Separately, we give a combinatorial, computer-assisted proof that the hat must form hierarchical -- and hence aperiodic -- tilings.

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