Thursday, March 6, 2014

Interesting Math Stuff #8: Tesselations

tessellation is a pattern of geometric shapes with no overlaps or gaps. This is an example of a tesselation you have probably seen before. It is a floor made up of hexagon shaped tiles. 














Tessellations can be extenended to higher dimensions. 
This concept is summarized in the wikipedia article on tessellations. It says:
"Tessellations in three or more dimensions are called honeycombs. In three dimensions there is just one regular honeycomb, which has eight cubes at each polyhedron vertex. Similarly, in three dimensions there is just one quasiregular honeycomb, which has eight tetrahedra and six octahedra at each polyhedron vertex. However there are many possible semiregular honeycombs in three dimensions"
Here is an example of a three dimensional tessellation: 
















Math joke of the day: 
Q: What is the definition of a polar bear? 
A: A rectangular bear after a coordinate transformation 

source: http://www.jokes4us.com/miscellaneousjokes/mathjokes/

2 comments:

  1. Very cool and interesting, I like it! Good Job!

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  2. Haha great joke and well written and interesting post. Great job!

    ReplyDelete