A Penrose tiling is an example of an aperiodic tiling. Here, a tiling is a covering of the plane by non-overlapping polygons or other shapes, and a tiling is aperiodic if it does not contain arbitrarily large periodic regions or patches. However, despite their lack of translational symmetry, Penrose tilings may have both reflection symmetry and fivefold rotational symmetry. Penrose tilings are named after mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who investigated them in the 1970s.
There are several variants of Penrose tilings with different tile shapes. The original form of Penrose tiling used tiles of four different shapes, but this was later reduced to only two shapes: either two different rhombi, or two different quadrilaterals called kites and darts. The Penrose tilings are obtained by constraining the ways in which these shapes are allowed to fit together in a way that avoids periodic tiling. This may be done in several different ways, including matching rules, substitution tiling or finite subdivision rules, cut and project schemes, and coverings. Even constrained in this manner, each variation yields infinitely many different Penrose tilings.
Penrose tilings are self-similar: they may be converted to equivalent Penrose tilings with different sizes of tiles, using processes called inflation and deflation. The pattern represented by every finite patch of tiles in a Penrose tiling occurs infinitely many times throughout the tiling. They are quasicrystals: implemented as a physical structure a Penrose tiling will produce diffraction patterns with Bragg peaks and five-fold symmetry, revealing the repeated patterns and fixed orientations of its tiles. The study of these tilings has been important in the understanding of physical materials that also form quasicrystals. Penrose tilings have also been applied in architecture and decoration, as in the floor tiling shown.
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dan Shechtman for "The discovery of quasicrystals." Penrose tiling was mentioned for having "'helped pave the way for the understanding of the discovery of quasicrystals.'"
Background and history
Periodic and aperiodic tilings
Covering a flat surface ("the plane") with some pattern of geometric shapes ("tiles"), with no overlaps or gaps, is called a tiling. The most familiar tilings, such as covering a floor with squares meeting edge-to-edge, are examples of periodic tilings. If a square tiling is shifted by the width of a tile, parallel to the sides of the tile, the result is the same pattern of tiles as before the shift. A shift (formally, a translation) that preserves the tiling in this way is called a period of the tiling. A tiling is called periodic when it has periods that shift the tiling in two different directions.General references for this article include , , and .
The tiles in the square tiling have only one shape, and it is common for other tilings to have only a finite number of shapes. These shapes are called prototiles, and a set of prototiles is said to admit a tiling or tile the plane if there is a tiling of the plane using only these shapes. That is, each tile in the tiling must be congruent to one of these prototiles.
A tiling that has no periods is non-periodic. A set of prototiles is said to be aperiodic if all of its tilings are non-periodic, and in this case its tilings are also called aperiodic tilings. Penrose tilings are among the simplest known examples of aperiodic tilings of the plane by finite sets of prototiles.
Earliest aperiodic tilings
The subject of aperiodic tilings received new interest in the 1960s when logician Hao Wang noted connections between decision problems and tilings. In particular, he introduced tilings by square plates with colored edges, now known as Wang dominoes or tiles, and posed the "Domino Problem": to determine whether a given set of Wang dominoes could tile the plane with matching colors on adjacent domino edges. He observed that if this problem were undecidable, then there would have to exist an aperiodic set of Wang dominoes. At the time, this seemed implausible, so Wang conjectured no such set could exist.
Wang's student Robert Berger proved that the Domino Problem was undecidable (so Wang's conjecture was incorrect) in his 1964 thesis, and obtained an aperiodic set of 20,426 Wang dominoes. He also described a reduction to 104 such prototiles; the latter did not appear in his published monograph, but in 1968, Donald Knuth detailed a modification of Berger's set requiring only 92 dominoes.
The color matching required in a tiling by Wang dominoes can easily be achieved by modifying the edges of the tiles like jigsaw puzzle pieces so that they can fit together only as prescribed by the edge colorings. Raphael Robinson, in a 1971 paper which simplified Berger's techniques and undecidability proof, used this technique to obtain an aperiodic set of just six prototiles.
Development of the Penrose tilings
The first Penrose tiling (tiling P1 below) is an aperiodic set of six prototiles, introduced by Roger Penrose in a 1974 paper, based on pentagons rather than squares. Any attempt to tile the plane with regular pentagons necessarily leaves gaps, but Johannes Kepler showed, in his 1619 work Harmonices Mundi, that these gaps can be filled using pentagrams (star polygons), decagons and related shapes. Kepler extended this tiling by five polygons and found no periodic patterns, and already conjectured that every extension would introduce a new feature hence creating an aperiodic tiling. Traces of these ideas can also be found in the work of Albrecht Dürer. Acknowledging inspiration from Kepler, Penrose found matching rules for these shapes, obtaining an aperiodic set. These matching rules can be imposed by decorations of the edges, as with the Wang tiles. Penrose's tiling can be viewed as a completion of Kepler's finite Aa pattern.
Penrose subsequently reduced the number of prototiles to two, discovering the kite and dart tiling (tiling P2 below) and the rhombus tiling (tiling P3 below). The rhombus tiling was independently discovered by Robert Ammann in 1976. Penrose and John H. Conway investigated the properties of Penrose tilings, and discovered that a substitution property explained their hierarchical nature; their findings were publicized by Martin Gardner in his January 1977 "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.
In 1981, N. G. de Bruijn provided two different methods to construct Penrose tilings. De Bruijn's "multigrid method" obtains the Penrose tilings as the dual graphs of arrangements of five families of parallel lines. In his "cut and project method", Penrose tilings are obtained as two-dimensional projections from a five-dimensional cubic structure. In these approaches, the Penrose tiling is viewed as a set of points, its vertices, while the tiles are geometrical shapes obtained by connecting vertices with edges. A 1990 construction by Baake, Kramer, Schlottmann, and Zeidler derived the Penrose tiling and the related Tübingen triangle tiling in a similar manner from the four-dimensional 5-cell honeycomb.
Penrose tilings The three types of Penrose tiling, P1–P3, are described individually below.The P1–P3 notation is taken from They have many common features: in each case, the tiles are constructed from shapes related to the pentagon (and hence to the golden ratio), but the basic tile shapes need to be supplemented by matching rules in order to tile aperiodically. These rules may be described using labeled vertices or edges, or patterns on the tile faces; alternatively, the edge profile can be modified (e.g. by indentations and protrusions) to obtain an aperiodic set of prototiles.
Original pentagonal Penrose tiling (P1)
Penrose's first tiling uses pentagons and three other shapes: a five-pointed "star" (a pentagram), a "boat" (also known as a "justice cap", roughly 3/5 of a star) and a "diamond" (a thin rhombus). To ensure that all tilings are non-periodic, there are that specify how tiles may meet each other, and there are three different types of matching rule for the pentagonal tiles. Treating these three types as different prototiles gives a set of six prototiles overall. It is common to indicate the three different types of pentagonal tiles using three different colors, as in the figure above right."However, as will be explained momentarily, differently colored pentagons will be considered to be different types of tiles." ; , shows the edge modifications needed to yield an aperiodic set of prototiles.
Kite and dart tiling (P2)
Penrose's second tiling uses quadrilaterals called the "kite" and "dart", which may be combined to make a rhombus. However, the matching rules prohibit such a combination."The rhombus of course tiles periodically, but we are not allowed to join the pieces in this manner." Both the kite and dart are composed of two triangles, called Robinson triangles, after 1975 notes by Robinson.
The kite is a quadrilateral whose four interior angles are 72, 72, 72, and 144 degrees. The kite may be bisected along its axis of symmetry to form a pair of acute Robinson triangles (with angles of 36, 72 and 72 degrees). The dart is a non-convex quadrilateral whose four interior angles are 36, 72, 36, and 216 degrees. The dart may be bisected along its axis of symmetry to form a pair of obtuse Robinson triangles (with angles of 36, 36 and 108 degrees), which are smaller than the acute triangles.
The matching rules can be described in several ways. One approach is to color the vertices (with two colors, e.g., black and white) and require that adjacent tiles have matching vertices. Another is to use a pattern of circular arcs (as shown above left in green and red) to constrain the placement of tiles: when two tiles share an edge in a tiling, the patterns must match at these edges.
These rules often force the placement of certain tiles: for example, the concave vertex of any dart is necessarily filled by two kites. The corresponding figure (center of the top row in the lower image on the left) is called an "ace" by Conway; although it looks like an enlarged kite, it does not tile in the same way. Similarly the concave vertex formed when two kites meet along a short edge is necessarily filled by two darts (bottom right). In fact, there are only seven possible ways for the tiles to meet at a vertex; two of these figures – namely, the "star" (top left) and the "sun" (top right) – have 5-fold dihedral symmetry (by rotations and reflections), while the remainder have a single axis of reflection (vertical in the image). Apart from the ace (top middle) and the sun, all of these vertex figures force the placement of additional tiles.
Rhombus tiling (P3)
The third tiling uses a pair of rhombuses (often referred to as "rhombs" in this context) with equal sides but different angles. Ordinary rhombus-shaped tiles can be used to tile the plane periodically, so restrictions must be made on how tiles can be assembled: no two tiles may form a parallelogram, as this would allow a periodic tiling, but this constraint is not sufficient to force aperiodicity, as figure 1 above shows.
There are two kinds of tile, both of which can be decomposed into Robinson triangles. The thin rhomb t has four corners with angles of 36, 144, 36, and 144 degrees. The t rhomb may be bisected along its short diagonal to form a pair of acute Robinson triangles. The thick rhomb T has angles of 72, 108, 72, and 108 degrees. The T rhomb may be bisected along its long diagonal to form a pair of obtuse Robinson triangles; in contrast to the P2 tiling, these are larger than the acute triangles.