Pinwheel Tiling - The Pinwheel Tilings

The Pinwheel Tilings

Radin relied on the above construction of Conway to define Pinwheel tilings. Formally, the Pinwheel tilings are the tilings whose tiles are isometric copies of, with a tile maying intersect another tile only either on a whole side or on half the length side, and such that the following property holds. Given any Pinwheel tiling, there is a Pinwheel tiling which, once each tile is divided in five following the Conway construction and the result is dilated by a factor, is equal to . In other words, the tiles of any Pinwheel tilings can be grouped five-by-five into homothetic tiles, so that these homothetic tiles form (up to rescaling) a new Pinwheel tiling.

The tiling constructed by Conway is a Pinwheel tiling, but there are uncountably many other different Pinwheel tiling. They are all locally undistinguishable (i.e., they have the same finite patches). They all share with the Conway tiling the property that tiles appear in infinitely many orientations (and vertices have rational coordinates).

The main result proven by Radin is that there is a finite (though very large) set of so-called prototiles, with each being obtained by coloring the sides of, so that the Pinwheel tilings are exactly the tilings of the plane by isometric copies of these prototiles, with the condition that whenever two copies intersect in a point, they have the same color in this point. In terms of symbolic dynamics, this means that the Pinwheel tilings form a sofic subshift.