Pentagon - Pentagons in Tiling

Pentagons in Tiling

A pentagon cannot appear in any tiling made by regular polygons. To prove a pentagon cannot form a regular tiling (one in which all faces are congruent), observe that 360 / 108 = 31⁄3, which is not a whole number. More difficult is proving a pentagon cannot be in any edge-to-edge tiling made by regular polygons:

There are no combinations of regular polygons with 4 or more meeting at a vertex that contain a pentagon. For combinations with 3, if 3 polygons meet at a vertex and one has an odd number of sides, the other 2 must be congruent. The reason for this is that the polygons that touch the edges of the pentagon must alternate around the pentagon, which is impossible because of the pentagon's odd number of sides. For the pentagon, this results in a polygon whose angles are all (360 − 108) / 2 = 126°. To find the number of sides this polygon has, the result is 360 / (180 − 126) = 62⁄3, which is not a whole number. Therefore, a pentagon cannot appear in any tiling made by regular polygons.

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