Related papers: Determining the essentially different partitions o…
The tangram and Sei Shonagon Chie no Ita are popular dissection puzzles consisting of seven pieces. Each puzzle can be formed by identifying edges from sixteen identical right isosceles triangles. It is known that the tangram can form 13…
The old Chinese puzzle tangram gives rise to serious mathematical problems when one asks for all tangram figures that satisfy particular geometric properties. All $13$ convex tangram figures are known since 1942. They include the only…
The problem of classifying the convex pentagons that admit tilings of the plane is a long-standing unsolved problem. Previous to this article, there were 14 known distinct kinds of convex pentagons that admit tilings of the plane. Five of…
We present an exhaustive search of all families of convex pentagons which tile the plane. This research shows that there are no more than the already 15 known families. In particular, this implies that there is no convex polygon which…
Between 17th and 19th centuries, mathematically orientated votive tablets appeared in Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples all over Japan. Known as sangaku, they contained problems of a largely geometrical nature. In the 17th century, the…
We study the dissection of a square into congruent convex polygons. Yuan \emph{et al.} [Dissecting the square into five congruent parts, Discrete Math. \textbf{339} (2016) 288-298] asked whether, if the number of tiles is a prime number…
We introduce a computational origami problem which we call the segment folding problem: given a set of $n$ line-segments in the plane the aim is to make creases along all segments in the minimum number of folding steps. Note that a folding…
Consider an oriented curve $\Gamma$ in a domain $D$ in the plane $\boldsymbol R^2$. Thinking of $D$ as a piece of paper, one can make a curved folding in the Euclidean space $\boldsymbol R^3$. This can be expressed as the image of an…
We give a computer-based proof of the following fact: If a square is divided into seven or nine convex polygons, congruent among themselves, then the tiles are rectangles.
Jigsaw puzzle solving requires the rearrangement of unordered pieces into their original pose in order to reconstruct a coherent whole, often an image, and is known to be an intractable problem. While the possible impact of automatic puzzle…
We introduce the problem of partitioning 2D regions (usually convex regions) into mutually congruent pieces ('tiles').
A division sudoku is a latin square whose all six conjugates are sudoku squares. We enumerate division sudokus up to a suitable equivalence, introduce powerful invariants of division sudokus, and also study latin squares that are division…
Sets of three types of convex pentagons that are aperiodic with no matching conditions on the edges are created from a chiral aperiodic monotile Tile(1, 1). This method divides the interior of Tile(1,1) into five convex polygons with five…
A tangram is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Thus it can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The \emph{cut number} of a tangram is the minimum number of required cuts in this…
The number of complete tilings of m X n floors for tiles of shape 1 X 2, 1 X 3, 1 X 4 and 2 X 3 is computed numerically for floors up to width m=9 and variable floor lengths n. Counts are obtained for two classes, for fixed tile stack…
A tanglegram consists of two binary rooted trees with the same number of leaves and a perfect matching between the leaves of the trees. We show that the two halves of a random tanglegram essentially look like two independently chosen random…
The aim in packing problems is to decide if a given set of pieces can be placed inside a given container. A packing problem is defined by the types of pieces and containers to be handled, and the motions that are allowed to move the pieces.…
We investigate a type of a Sudoku variant called Sudo-Kurve, which allows bent rows and columns, and develop a new, yet equivalent, variant we call a Sudo-Cube. We examine the total number of distinct solution grids for this type with or…
We prove several hardness results on folding origami crease patterns. Flat-folding finite crease patterns is fixed-parameter tractable in the ply of the folded pattern (how many layers overlap at any point) and the treewidth of an…
Every body knows that identical regular triangles or squares can tile the whole plane. Many people know that identical regular hexagons can tile the plane properly as well. In fact, even the bees know and use this fact! Is there any other…