A counterexample to the periodic tiling conjecture
Abstract
The periodic tiling conjecture asserts that any finite subset of a lattice which tiles that lattice by translations, in fact tiles periodically. In this work we disprove this conjecture for sufficiently large , which also implies a disproof of the corresponding conjecture for Euclidean spaces . In fact, we also obtain a counterexample in a group of the form for some finite abelian -group . Our methods rely on encoding a "Sudoku puzzle" whose rows and other non-horizontal lines are constrained to lie in a certain class of "-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