Tileable Surfaces

Abstract

We study $C^1$-regular surfaces in $R^3$ that admit tilings by a finite number of rigid motion congruence classes of tiles. We construct examples with various topologies and present a framework for a systematic study, mainly concentrating on monotilings. A finite edge prototile is a tile that has only a finite number of possible interfaces with adjacent copies of itself. We describe all monotilings by such tiles with three or less edges. We consider the question of whether a monohedral polyhedron can be smoothed to become a finite edge type tileable surface with the same graph structure, and we give an example where this is not possible. Finally we list some open problems.

Version 2, minor changes to wording, references added. To appear in Advances in Geometry