-
Tessellations
The flooring in our house and the walls of the bathrooms are covered with tiles. These tiles are available in different shapes, colours and sizes. They are placed in a way that they don’t overlap with the other and there are no gaps between them.
-
What is a tessellation?
A tessellation is a repeated arrangement of plane figures, which fit together to fill a space with no overlaps or gaps between them. Another word for tessellation is tiling. The first tilings were made from square tiles. The word "tessellate" is derived from the Ionic version of the Greek word "tesseres", which in English means "four". Tessellations frequently appeared in the art of M. C. Escher.
-
Regular tessellations
A regular tessellation is a highly symmetric tessellation made up of congruent regular polygons. There are only three regular tessellations - those made up of equilateral triangles, squares and regular hexagons.
-
Semi-regular tessellations
Patterns formed using two or more regular polygons are called semi-regular tessellations. You can use a variety of regular polygons to make semi-regular tessellations. The beauty of a semi-regular tessellation is the identical arrangement of polygons at every vertex point.
-
Are there tessellations around us?
Tessellations can be found all around us. The scales on a fish, tortoise shell, a corn cob, a honeycomb of bees are all examples of tessellations in nature.
-
Tessellations in architecture
Tessellations are also seen in art and history from ancient architecture to modern art.
A few examples are shown in this picture. Try to find your own tessellations around you!
