On the strange kinetic aesthetic of rectangular shape partitions

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we focus on shape partitions. We show that for any fixed k, one can symbolically characterize the shape partition on a k × n rectangular grid by a context-free grammar. We explicitly give this grammar for k = 2 and k = 3 (for k = 1, this corresponds to compositions of integers). From these grammars, we deduce the number of shape partitions for the k × n rectangular grids for k ∈ {1, 2, 3} and every n, as well as the limiting Gaussian distribution of the number of connected components. This also enables us to randomly and uniformly generate shape partitions of large size.