Characterization of planar pseudo-self-similar tilings (Q5953073)

A pseudo-self-similar tiling is a hierarchical tiling of Euclidean space which obeys a non-exact substitution rule: the substitution for a tile is not geometrically similar to itself. An example is the Penrose tiling drawn with `thick' and `thin' rhombi. The authors prove that a nonperiodic repetitive tiling of the plane is pseudo-self-similar if and only if it has a finite number of derived Voronoi tilings up to similarity. To establish this characterization, the authors settle a conjecture of E. A. Robinson by providing an algorithm which converts any pseudo-self-similar planar tiling into a self-similar tiling with some useful topological properties.