The Aperiodical 

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Small Sets of Arc-Sided Tiles

By Tim Lexen. Posted October 26, 2019

Tim has previously written guest posts here about tiling by tricurves, and is now looking at ways of tiling with other shapes.



In an earlier post elsewhere I covered some basic arc-sided shapes that tile by themselves. Lately I’ve been playing with groups of curved tiling shapes, asking a question common for me: how to get the most play value as an open-ended puzzle? This means getting the most interesting possibilities from the simplest set. “Interesting” includes variety, complexity, challenge and aesthetic appeal. “Simplest” covers not only size of set and the shapes, but also the least total information needed to describe or construct the shapes.

Making Tricurves

By Katie Steckles and Tim Lexen. Posted February 18, 2019

Tim Lexen has written a series of posts on the topic of Tricurves: Bending the Law of Sines, Combining Tricurves and Phantom Tiling. In this latest post, Tim has been working with our own Katie Steckles to turn Tricurves into real objects to play with.



When you discover an interesting mathematical shape or object, there’s a strong instinct to play with it – maybe by drawing sketches and doodles to test the limits of the idea. But in the case of Tricurves, drawing an accurate shape takes a little time, and it doesn’t lend itself well to idle experimentation.

Producing a physical version of a shape, in enough quantity to allow for experimentation, makes it much more tangible. In our own respective locations, we’ve each made use of laser cutting facilities to produce wooden Tricurve tiles to play with, and we encourage you to join in.

Combining Tricurves

By Tim Lexen. Posted September 9, 2018

In July, guest author Tim Lexen wrote about his discovery of the tricurve, a shape made of arcs that has some interesting properties. He’s written a follow-up in which he explores them further. For a discussion of tiling with curve-sided shapes in general, see Tim’s MathBlog post.



Tricurves can be combined when the large, convex arc of one fills a concave space of another. A tricurve can be thought of as a shape that fills a concave arc with two smaller arcs of the same total length. In each case the new arcs stay within the boundaries of the original structure: touching the same bounding arc. This could go on repeatedly (see below) but we’ll focus here on joining two tricurves. Like the tricurves, assuming agreeable angles, the combined shape will often be able to tile the plane periodically, non-periodically, and radially with itself and related shapes.