English

Tiling $R^{5}$ by Crosses

Information Theory 2014-09-17 v3 Combinatorics math.IT

Abstract

An nn-dimensional cross comprises 2n+12n+1 unit cubes: the center cube and reflections in all its faces. It is well known that there is a tiling of RnR^{n} by crosses for all n.n. AlBdaiwi and the first author proved that if 2n+12n+1 is not a prime then there are 202^{\aleph_{0}} \ non-congruent regular (= face-to-face) tilings of RnR^{n} by crosses, while there is a unique tiling of RnR^{n} by crosses for n=2,3n=2,3. They conjectured that this is always the case if 2n+12n+1 is a prime. To support the conjecture we prove in this paper that also for R5R^{5} there is a unique regular, and no non-regular, tiling by crosses. So there is a unique tiling of R3R^{3} by crosses, there are 202^{\aleph_{0}} tilings of R4,R^{4}, but for R5R^{5} there is again only one tiling by crosses. We guess that this result goes against our intuition that suggests "the higher the dimension of the \ space, the more freedom we get".

Cite

@article{arxiv.1206.4436,
  title  = {Tiling $R^{5}$ by Crosses},
  author = {Peter Horak and Viliam Hromada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.4436},
  year   = {2014}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:22:22.091Z