Tessellation

The original tessellation were inspired by mosaic designs.

The Romans in particular were famous for their mosaic
floors and walls.
The Latin word tessera, sometime written as tessella, was
the word for one small tile.
The tiling pattern came to be known as tessellation.

A pattern of shapes that covers a flat surface with no

overlaps or gaps is called a tessellation.

Here are some examples of tessellation.

Each pattern uses one shape repeatedly to form a design.
This is how to tessellate any triangle.
Step 1: Draw a triangle-it can be any shape as long as it is a
triangle.
Step 2: Draw a 180 degrees rotation of the triangle next to
the original.

You now have a parallelogram made up of two

triangle.

Step 3: Repeat these two steps to place another

parallelogram nex to the first one.
You are building up a row of triangles.
Step 4: Now draw another row of triangles next to the first
row.

Step 5: You can now see how the tessellation is built up.
Colour in the final design.
It is possible to see why this works if the triangle are
labelled.
Here is the original triangle with the angles marked a,b,c.
The angles of triangle add up to 180 degrees, so a+b+c=180.

Look now at a corner in the final tessellation

Arround the corner circled in this diagram there are two of
each angle from the original triangle.
Altogether the angles arround that point add up to:
2a+2b+2c=360.
You know that the angles arround a point add up to 360 and
this is always the case if a triangle is tessellated like this.

REGULAR TESSELLATIONS
Here is a tessellation of an equilateral triangle.
At each vertex of the tessellation there are six angles
meeting. It is tessellate because 6x60=360
Here is a tessellation of a square.
4x90=360.

Here is a diagram showing some regular octogons.

When 4 octogon are put together there is a square gap.
Regular octogon do not form a regular tessellation.
Check this by looking at the interior angle. Each interior
angle is 135.
135x2=270
135x3=405, so 135 is not a factor of 360.