Related papers: From Dominoes to Hexagons

We study in this paper three natural notions of convergence of homogeneous manifolds, namely infinitesimal, local and pointed, and their relationship with a fourth one, which only takes into account the underlying algebraic structure of the…

Doubly periodic (DP) weaves and polycatenanes are complex entangled structures embedded in the Euclidean thickened plane, invariant under translations in two independent directions. Their topological properties are fully encoded within a…

A tanglegram consists of two rooted binary trees and a perfect matching between their leaves, and a planar tanglegram is one that admits a layout with no crossings. We show that the problem of generating planar tanglegrams uniformly at…

We describe computer algorithms that produce the complete set of isohedral tilings by n-omino or n-iamond tiles in which the tiles are fundamental domains and the tilings have 3-, 4-, or 6-fold rotational symmetry. The symmetry groups of…

Three types of geometric structure---grid triangulations, rectangular subdivisions, and orthogonal polyhedra---can each be described combinatorially by a regular labeling: an assignment of colors and orientations to the edges of an…

We introduce a linear algebraic object called a bidiagonal triple. A bidiagonal triple consists of three diagonalizable linear transformations on a finite-dimensional vector space, each of which acts in a bidiagonal fashion on the…

We investigate a special kind of contraction of symmetric spaces (respectively, of Lie triple systems), called homotopy. In this first part of a series of two papers we construct such contractions for classical symmetric spaces in an…

We formulate and prove a variational principle (in the sense of thermodynamics) for random domino tilings, or equivalently for the dimer model on a square grid. This principle states that a typical tiling of an arbitrary finite region can…

The classification of Grassmannian cluster algebras resembles that of regular polygonal tilings. We conjecture that this resemblance may indicate a deeper connection between these seemingly unrelated structures.

We define homology of ternary algebras satisfying axioms derived from particle scattering or, equivalently, from the third Reidemeister move. We show that ternary quasigroups satisfying these axioms appear naturally in invariants of…

We investigate zigzags in triangulations of connected closed $2$-dimensional surfaces and show that there is a one-to-one correspondence between triangulations with homogeneous zigzags and closed $2$-cell embeddings of directed Eulerian…

We use the subgraph replacement method to investigate new properties of the tilings of regions on the square lattice with diagonals drawn in. In particular, we show that the centrally symmetric tilings of a generalization of the Aztec…

Polypols are natural generalizations of polytopes, with boundaries given by nonlinear algebraic hypersurfaces. We describe polypols in the plane and in 3-space that admit a unique adjoint hypersurface and study them from an…

We present a single, connected tile which can tile the plane but only non-periodically. The tile is hexagonal with edge markings, which impose simple rules as to how adjacent tiles are allowed to meet across edges. The first of these rules…

In this paper I will unite two games, symplectic billiards and tiling billiards. The new game is called symplectic tiling billiards. I will prove a result about periodic orbits of symplectic tiling billiards in a very special case and then…

A classical theorem of MacMahon states that the number of lozenge tilings of any centrally symmetric hexagon drawn on the triangular lattice is given by a beautifully simple product formula. In this paper we present a counterpart of this…

We present two algorithms for unfolding the surface of any polyhedron, all of whose faces are triangles, to a nonoverlapping, connected planar layout. The surface is cut only along polyhedron edges. The layout is connected, but it may have…

The question of whether a given region can be successfully filled by a finite set of tiles has been commonly studied, and there are many available arguments for whether a given finite region can be tiled. We can show that there is no domino…

Hexagon relations are combinatorial or algebraic realizations of four-dimensional Pachner moves. We introduce some simple set-theoretic hexagon relations and then `quantize' them using what we call `polynomial hexagon cohomologies'. Based…

The regular 2n-gon (square, hexagon, octagon, ...) is subdivided into smaller polygons (tiles) by the subset of diagonals which run parallel to any of the 2n sides. The manuscript reports on the number of tiles up to the 78-gon.