Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The Basics of Tessellations

Hello! Kristian and Shim are here to show you specifics of...

Tessellations!

Read more to find out the basics of tessellations.
According to the definition, a tessellation is an art form, in which shapes are interlocked in a way that there is no gaps. Sounds complicated? We'll just say that they are a mosaic of shapes with no spaces.


Tessellations were first studied by Johannes Kepler in 1619. He wrote about regular and semi regular tessellations that covered a plane with regular polygons. About two hundred years later in 1891, a Russian crystallographer by the name of Yevgraf Fyodorov proved that all periodic tiling of the plane features one of seventeen different groups of isometries. His work marked the unofficial beginning of the mathematical study of tessellations. Other important contributors include Shubnikov Belov (1952) and Heinrich Heesch and Otto Kienzle (1963).


You should already know that "geometry" is part of this. Geometry is part of this, since geometry is the study of shapes, and tessellations is an example of geometry, since they are the interlocking of shapes. For the "nature" part, there are many, many, MANY, examples of tesselations in nature, and we will post examples and explain the geometric properties of them in an upcoming post.


Here is a question for you guys to debate about:


 Are there any ways that tesselations can become useful? Are there any uses for tessellations?


 Comment below, we wanna know!

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