Sommerville's missing tetrahedra (Q878075)

From MaRDI portal





scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5146121
Language Label Description Also known as
default for all languages
No label defined
    English
    Sommerville's missing tetrahedra
    scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5146121

      Statements

      Sommerville's missing tetrahedra (English)
      0 references
      0 references
      26 April 2007
      0 references
      In 1923 \textit{D. M. Y. Sommerville} [Edinb. R. S. Proc. 43, 85--116 (1923; JFM 49.0411.03)] determined a list of four tetrahedra such that there exist face-to-face tilings of the Euclidean space by properly congruent copies of a tetrahedron. The paper under review considers the case which was not examined by Sommerville. It is proved that the missing tetrahedron does not admit any face-to-face tiling of the Euclidean space if the copies of tetrahedron are properly congruent, i.e. congruent by an orientation-preserving isometry. Therefore, the Sommerville's classification is complete. However this tetrahedron admits tilings that are either non-proper face-to-face or proper non-face-to-face. Remark that no assumptions about a symmetry group of the tiling are made.
      0 references
      tilings of the Euclidean space
      0 references
      tilings by tetrahedra
      0 references
      face-to-face tilings
      0 references

      Identifiers