Truchet Tiles and Combinatorial Arabesque

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new topic on geometric patterns issued from Truchet tile, that we agree to call combinatorial arabesque. The originally Truchet tile, by reference to the French scientist of 17th century Sébastien Truchet, is a square split along the diagonal into two triangles of contrasting colors. We define an equivalence relation on the set of all square tiling of same size, leading naturally to investigate the equivalence classes and their cardinality. Thanks to this class notion, it will be possible to measure the beauty degree of a Truchet square tiling by means of an appropriate algebraic group. Also, we define many specific arabesques such as entirely symmetric, magic and hyper-maximal arabesques. Mathematical characterizations of such arabesques are established facilitating thereby their enumeration and their algorithmic generating. Finally the notion of irreducibility is introduced on arabesques.