Convex pentagons that admit i-block transitive tilings

Abstract

The problem of classifying the convex pentagons that admit tilings of the plane is a long-standing unsolved problem. Previous to this article, there were 14 known distinct kinds of convex pentagons that admit tilings of the plane. Five of these types admit tile-transitive tilings (i.e. there is a single transitivity class with respect to the symmetry group of the tiling). The remaining 9 types do not admit tile-transitive tilings, but do admit either 2-block transitive tilings or 3-block transitive tilings; these are tilings comprised of clusters of 2 or 3 pentagons such that these clusters form tile-2-transitive or tile-3-transitive tilings. In this article, we present some combinatorial results concerning pentagons that admit i-block transitive tilings for $$i \in \mathbb {N}$$ . These results form the basis for an automated approach to finding all pentagons that admit i-block transitive tilings for each $$i \in \mathbb {N}$$ . We will present the methods of this algorithm and the results of the computer searches so far, which includes a complete classification of all pentagons admitting i-block transitive tilings for $$i \le 4$$ , among which is a new 15th type of convex pentagon that admits a tile-3-transitive tiling.