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9. TESSELLATIONS AND On the north-east coast of Northern Island there is an area called the Giant’s Causeway, comprising some 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of a volcanic eruption. The columns fit together, assuming polygonal cross-sections: mostly hexagonal but some with four, five, seven and eight sides. In mathematics we can study the regular tessellations, in which all the polygons are regular and have the same number of edges (how many of these are there?), and the semiregular tessellations in which all the polygons are regular but of more than one kind, and in which the arrangement of polygons about each common vertex is the same. You might like to investigate these. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant's_Causeway
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– Paul Scott |
