A Pedestrian Approach to a Method of Conway, or, A Tale of Two Cities (Q4389740)

The paper presents, in an amusing way, a method for showing that a certain kind of tiling does not exist. A tetromino is formed by taking the union of four cells in a square grid. Of the five connected tetrominoes, consider just the square and the skew tetromino. Call a square tetromino even if the sum of the coordinates of each vertex is even; otherwise the square tetromino is called odd. Main theorem. Suppose a simply-connected region in the plane can be tiled by a mixture of skew tetrominoes and square tetrominoes. Then the number of even square tetrominoes minus the number of odd square tetrominoes does not depend on the tiling one chooses; i.e., it is an invariant. In particular, if the difference is non-zero for any such tiling, then the region cannot be tiled by skew tetrominoes alone. The result is applied to show that a certain region called an Aztec diamond cannot be tiled by skew tetrominoes. As explained by the author, behind the proof of the theorem lies Conway's combinatorial group theoretic method as given by \textit{J. H. Conway} and \textit{J. C. Lagarias} [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 53, No. 2, 183-208 (1990; Zbl 0741.05019)] and by \textit{W. P. Thurston} [Am. Math. Mon. 97, No. 8, 757-773 (1990; Zbl 0714.52007)].