In the first post in this series, I introduced the concept of a shape’s Heesch number. In brief, if a shape doesn’t tile the plane, its Heesch number is a measure of the maximum number of times you can surround the shape with layers of copies of itself. (Shapes that do …
I love tiling theory. It’s a branch of mathematics that brings together many beautiful ideas, and that offers a lot of open questions for exploration. And of course, it gives us tools to apply mathematics in the world of art and design. Normally, in my research as a computer scientist …
Anybody who has attended a Bridges conference in past ten years will be familiar with the work of Rinus Roelofs. His talks always offer an entertaining contrast: stunning and inspiring ideas in the intersection of geometry and art, balanced with his humble, low-key delivery. It was also Rinus who suggested …
The photo above is a paper model of a polyhedron that I just assembled. The model consists of four dodecagons (12-sided regular polygons) and 12 decagons (10-sided regular polygons). The holes are 28 equilateral triangles that in theory could be filled with more paper. This polyhedron has a few symmetries, …
Hi, my name is Craig Kaplan. I’m a Computer Science professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I’m using my blog as a convenient place to put out a call to comic artists for test images that we could use in our research. My PhD student Matthew Thorne is working on software …