Unilateral tilings of the plane with squares of three sizes (Q1267347)

A tiling \(\mathcal H\) of the Euclidean plane by squares of three distinct sizes is said to be a unilateral 3-tiling (U3-tiling) if no two congruent tiles have a common side, and it is called equitransitive provided for any pair \(S, S'\) of congruent tiles of \(\mathcal H\) there is a congruence transformation of the plane preserving the tiling and mapping \(S\) onto \(S'\). The authors present three new examples of equitransitive U3-tilings, thus showing that the list of five equitransitive U3-tilings by D. Schattschneider is incomplete and the problem to describe all equitransitive U3-tilings still remains open. The major part of the article under review describes for each tile \(t\) of an arbitrary U3-tiling how its first corona, i.e. the set of tiles having non-empty intersection with \(t\), can look like. If \(\lambda_{1} < \lambda_{2} < \lambda_{3}\) are the three sizes of the squares then one always has the relation \(\lambda_{3}=\lambda_{1} + \lambda_{2}\). It is remarkable that for a tile \(t\) of maximal size \(\lambda_{3}\) there are more possibilities for the first corona of \(t\) if the equality \(2\lambda_{1}=\lambda_{2}\) holds than in the generic case. In the third section, two theorems on the global structure of U3-tilings are proven. First, any U3-tiling \(\mathcal H\) is simple, i.e. there exists no convex region of the plane which has a tiling by at least two tiles of \(\mathcal H\). Second, in a U3-tiling tiles of each size occur infinitely many often.