Discrete Geometry – Family of Shapes That Can Be Tiled into One Another

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Okay, I'm trying to ask a question which hasn't been asked before, it may be futile, but let's see.

So let's take a square, this will be our shape A. We can tile a 2×1 rectangle by using shapes congruent to A. So we take 2 squares to build a 2×1 rectangle. But… now we need to go back too. Can we do so?

Sure we can. So now we take the 2×1 rectangle as our shape B, and we tile shapes congruent to shape B to make shape A.

Hope it's clear enough whan I'm getting at. Now, we have 2 members in this family, but in fact, this family is infinite. It also includes the 3×1 rectangle, 4×1 rectangle, and so forth. It also includes several polyominoes, like the L-tetromino and the T-tetromino. They can all be transformed into a square, and into each other.

Another infinite family is composed of parallellograms. (If one would consider that as a different family)

(And I suppose you could also make a distinction between rectangles and squares, since not all rectangles can be tiled into a square, since one of its sides could be an irrational number)

But aside from all this, there's another, perhaps finite, family, which has the equilateral triangle as a member.
This trapezium is also a member, they can be coverted into one another.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/603586/can-you-make-an-equilateral-triangle-from-3identical-trapezoids

The sphinx, made up by 6 equilateral triangles, is also a member:

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3953136/which-equilateral-triangles-does-the-p-hexiamond-the-sphinx-tile

And then there's this one, a longer sphinx, made up by 8 equilateral triangles, from a book by Karl Scherer:

http://www.recmath.com/PolyPages/PolyPages/index.htm?Polyiamonds.htm

So now we have a family of 4 members. Are there any other? It seems to be unknown.

But what about other families? Can you find another family? I don't know any. I'm assuming that a family has to have at least 2 members.

Best Answer

Any member of a nontrivial family like this has to be a rep-tile; looking among those will give you many examples.

Some specific examples:

  • The family of all rectifiable polyominoes, which includes all rectangles with rational ratios but also many other polyominoes, like the T-tetromino (though classifying them is a hard problem in general). While it's not inconceivable to have a set of polyominoes which mutually tile one another that aren't rectifiable, to my knowledge every known reptilic polyomino is rectifiable, so no examples are known at least.

  • The family of all polyiamonds that can tile an equilateral triangle, which again includes those you list but also many more.

  • Let $S$ be the set of polyominoes which tile a rectangle via only translations and $180^\circ$ rotations - this includes all rectangles of rational ratios, the L tromino, the P pentomino, and many others (though certainly not all rectifiable polyominoes). Applying any affine transformation to the members of this set preserves their ability to tile one another.

  • The Sierpinski carpet, a domino formed from two Sierpinski carpets, and an L-tetromino formed from four Sierpinski carpets all mutually tile one another, to use one of the more fractally rep-tiles. (Many more examples in this vein are possible by subdividing the fractal at smaller scales.)

  • The Sierpinski triangle is a member of a family along with a row of three Sierpinski triangles; here’s a diagram.

enter image description here

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