The Honeycomb Conjecture

We study periodic tessellations of the Euclidean space with unequal cells arising from the minimization of perimeter functionals. Existence results and qualitative properties of minimizers are discussed for different classes of problems, involving local and non-local perimeters. Regularity is then addressed in the general case under volume penalization, and in the planar case with the standard perimeter, prescribing the volumes of each cell. Finally, we show the optimality of...

We investigate a new family of regions that is the universal generalization of three well-known region families in the field of enumeration of tilings: the quasi-regular hexagons, the semi-hexagons, and the halved hexagons. We prove a simple product formula for the number of tilings of these new regions. Our main result also yields the enumerations of two special classes of plane partitions with restricted parts.

R. Nandakumar asked whether there is a tiling of the plane by pairwise incongruent triangles of equal area and equal perimeter. Recently a negative answer was given by Kupavskii, Pach and Tardos. Still one may ask for weaker versions of the problem, or for the analogue of this problem for quadrangles, pentagons, or hexagons. Several answers were given by the first author in a previous paper. Here we solve three further cases. In particular, our main result shows that there ar...

If all tiles in a tiling are congruent, the tiling is called monohedral. Tiling by convex polygons is called edge-to-edge if any two convex polygons are either disjoint or share one vertex or one entire edge in common. In this paper, we prove that a convex polygon that can generate an edge-to-edge monohedral tiling must be able to generate a periodic tiling.

An irregular vertex in a tiling by polygons is a vertex of one tile and belongs to the interior of an edge of another tile. In this paper we show that for any integer $k\geq 3$, there exists a normal tiling of the Euclidean plane by convex hexagons of unit area with exactly $k$ irregular vertices. Using the same approach we show that there are normal edge-to-edge tilings of the plane by hexagons of unit area and exactly $k$ many $n$-gons ($n>6$) of unit area. A result of Akop...

We prove that any convex body in the plane can be partitioned into $m$ convex parts of equal areas and perimeters for any integer $m\ge 2$; this result was previously known for prime powers $m=p^k$. We also discuss possible higher-dimensional generalizations and difficulties of extending our technique to equalizing more than one non-additive function.

This Thesis aims to highlight some isoperimetric questions involving the, so-called, $N$-clusters. We first briefly recall the theoretical framework we are adopting. This is done in Chapter one. In chapter two we focus on the standard isoperimetric problem for planar $N$-cluster for large values of $N$ and we provide an equidistribution energy-type results under some suitable assumption. The third Chapter is devoted to a stability results of the hexagonal honeycomb tiling. Fi...

We present a new self-contained proof of the well-known fact that the minimal area of a Voronoi cell in a unit circle packing is equal to $2\sqrt{3}$, and the minimum is achieved only on a perfect hexagon. The proof is short and, in our opinion, instructive.

We prove that every unit area convex pentagon is contained in a convex quadrilateral of area no greater than $3/\sqrt{5}$, and that every unit area convex hexagon is contained in a convex pentagon of area no greater than $7/6$. Both results are tight as the case of the regular pentagon (hexagon) shows. We conjecture that for every $n\ge 6$, every unit area convex $n$ - gon is contained in a $(n-1)$ - gon of area no greater than $1+\tan(2\pi/n)\sec(\pi/n)/n$.

We explore an instance of the question of partitioning a polygon into pieces, each of which is as ``circular'' as possible, in the sense of having an aspect ratio close to 1. The aspect ratio of a polygon is the ratio of the diameters of the smallest circumscribing circle to the largest inscribed disk. The problem is rich even for partitioning regular polygons into convex pieces, the focus of this paper. We show that the optimal (most circular) partition for an equilateral tr...