| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
In Latin, tessella was a small cubical piece of clay, stone or glass used to make mosaics. The word "tessella" means "small square" (from "tessera", square, which in its turn is from the Greek word for "four").
One may also speak of tessellations of parts of the plane or of other surfaces. Generalizations to higher dimensions are also possible.
A regular tessellation is a tessellation made up of congruent regular polygons. Only three regular tessellations exist: those made up of triangles, squares, and hexagons.
Other types of tessellations are considered, depending on types of figures and types of pattern: regular vs. irregular, periodic vs. aperiodic, symmetric vs. asymmetric, fractal, etc.
Compare with the Penrose tiling, a tiling of two polygons that however create aperiodic patterns.
The tessellation is perhaps most well-known today for its use in the art of M.C. Escher.
In the subject of computer graphicsComputer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. The first major advance in computer gr, tessellation techniques are often used to manage datasets of polygons and diving them into suitable structures for renderingRendering has several different usages: Computer rendering Artistic rendering Kitchen rendering Industrial rendering.. Normally, at least for real-time rendering, the data is tessellated into triangles, which sometimes get refered to as triangulationAlgebraic topology Geometric topology In trigonometry and elementary geometry, triangulation is the process of finding a distance to a point by calculating the length of one side of a triangle, given measurements of angles and sides of the triangle formed.
See also: tiling, uniform tessellationIn mathematics, a uniform tessellation is a tessellation of a d dimensional space, or a (hyper) surface, such that all its vertices are identical, i. there is the same combination and arrangement of faces at each vertex. When applied to Euclidean space, t.
Discrete geometryDiscrete geometry Discrete geometry or combinatorial geometry may be loosely defined as study of geometrical objects and properties that are discrete or combinatorial, either by their nature or by their representation; the study that does not essentially