English

A counterexample to the periodic tiling conjecture

Combinatorics 2024-09-10 v3 Dynamical Systems

Abstract

The periodic tiling conjecture asserts that any finite subset of a lattice Zd\mathbb{Z}^d which tiles that lattice by translations, in fact tiles periodically. In this work we disprove this conjecture for sufficiently large dd, which also implies a disproof of the corresponding conjecture for Euclidean spaces Rd\mathbb{R}^d. In fact, we also obtain a counterexample in a group of the form Z2×G0\mathbb{Z}^2 \times G_0 for some finite abelian 22-group G0G_0. Our methods rely on encoding a "Sudoku puzzle" whose rows and other non-horizontal lines are constrained to lie in a certain class of "22-adically structured functions," in terms of certain functional equations that can be encoded in turn as a single tiling equation, and then demonstrating that solutions to this Sudoku puzzle exist, but are all non-periodic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.15847,
  title  = {A counterexample to the periodic tiling conjecture},
  author = {Rachel Greenfeld and Terence Tao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.15847},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

50 pages, 13 figures. Final version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:15:58.589Z