Undecidable Translational Tilings with Only Two Tiles, or One Nonabelian Tile

Rachel Greenfeld, Terence Tao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We construct an example of a group G= Z2× G for a finite abelian group G, a subset E of G, and two finite subsets F1, F2 of G, such that it is undecidable in ZFC whether Z2× E can be tiled by translations of F1, F2. In particular, this implies that this tiling problem is aperiodic, in the sense that (in the standard universe of ZFC) there exist translational tilings of E by the tiles F1, F2, but no periodic tilings. Previously, such aperiodic or undecidable translational tilings were only constructed for sets of eleven or more tiles (mostly in Z2). A similar construction also applies for G= Zd for sufficiently large d. If one allows the group G to be non-abelian, a variant of the construction produces an undecidable translational tiling with only one tile F. The argument proceeds by first observing that a single tiling equation is able to encode an arbitrary system of tiling equations, which in turn can encode an arbitrary system of certain functional equations once one has two or more tiles. In particular, one can use two tiles to encode tiling problems for an arbitrary number of tiles.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1652-1706
Number of pages55
JournalDiscrete and Computational Geometry
Volume70
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2023
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).

Funding

RG was partially supported by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Award. TT was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-1764034 and by a Simons Investigator Award. We gratefully acknowledge the hospitality and support of the Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics where a significant portion of this research was conducted. We thank David Roberts for drawing our attention to the reference [32], Hunter Spink for drawing our attention to the reference [15], Jarkko Kari for drawing our attention to the references [18 , 20 , 24], and Zachary Hunter for further corrections. We are also grateful to the anonymous referee for several suggestions that improved the exposition of this paper. RG was partially supported by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Award. TT was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-1764034 and by a Simons Investigator Award. We gratefully acknowledge the hospitality and support of the Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics where a significant portion of this research was conducted. We thank David Roberts for drawing our attention to the reference [], Hunter Spink for drawing our attention to the reference [], Jarkko Kari for drawing our attention to the references [, , ], and Zachary Hunter for further corrections. We are also grateful to the anonymous referee for several suggestions that improved the exposition of this paper.

FundersFunder number
National Science FoundationDMS-1764034
Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics

    Keywords

    • Aperiodic tiling
    • Decidability
    • Translational tiling

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