IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-1-4612-5394-5_14.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Tiling the Plane

In: To Infinity and Beyond

Author

Listed:
  • Eli Maor

    (Oakland University, Department of Mathematical Sciences)

Abstract

But let us return to ordinary geometry. Among the host of geometric figures around us, the regular polygons have always played a special role. A polygon (from the Greek words polys = many and gonon = angle) is a closed planar figure made up of straight line segments. A regular polygon is a polygon whose sides and angles are all equal. The simplest regular polygon is the equilateral triangle; next comes the square, followed by the pentagon, the hexagon, and so on. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Greeks were particulary interested in these regular polygons and used them to find an approximation for the number π. They knew, of course, that there exist infinitely many of these polygons; that is, for any given integer n ≥ 3, there exists a regular polygon having n sides—an “n-gon”, as mathematicians say.

Suggested Citation

  • Eli Maor, 1987. "Tiling the Plane," Springer Books, in: To Infinity and Beyond, chapter 14, pages 102-107, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4612-5394-5_14
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4612-5394-5_14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4612-5394-5_14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.