This paper is intended to provide an introduction to the theory of substitution tilings. For our purposes, tiling substitution rules are divided into two broad classes: geometric and combinatorial. Geometric substitution tilings include self-similar tilings such as the well-known Penrose tilings; for this class there is a substantial body of research in the literature. Combinatorial substitutions are just beginning to be examined, and some of what we present here is new. We give numerous examples, mention selected major results, discuss connections between the two classes of substitutions, include current research perspectives and questions, and provide an extensive bibliography. Although the author attempts to fairly represent the as a whole, the paper is not an exhaustive survey, and she apologizes for any important omissions.
Deep Dive into A primer on substitution tilings of the Euclidean plane.
This paper is intended to provide an introduction to the theory of substitution tilings. For our purposes, tiling substitution rules are divided into two broad classes: geometric and combinatorial. Geometric substitution tilings include self-similar tilings such as the well-known Penrose tilings; for this class there is a substantial body of research in the literature. Combinatorial substitutions are just beginning to be examined, and some of what we present here is new. We give numerous examples, mention selected major results, discuss connections between the two classes of substitutions, include current research perspectives and questions, and provide an extensive bibliography. Although the author attempts to fairly represent the as a whole, the paper is not an exhaustive survey, and she apologizes for any important omissions.
A tiling substitution rule is a rule that can be used to construct infinite tilings of R d using a finite number of tile types. The rule tells us how to "substitute" each tile type by a finite configuration of tiles in a way that can be repeated, growing ever larger pieces of tiling at each stage. In the limit, an infinite tiling of R d is obtained.
In this paper we take the perspective that there are two major classes of tiling substitution rules: those based on a linear expansion map and those relying instead upon a sort of “concatenation” of tiles. The first class, which we call geometric tiling substitutions, includes self-similar tilings, of which there are several well-known examples including the Penrose tilings. In this class a tile is substituted by a configuration of tiles that is a linear expansion of itself, and this geometric rigidity has permitted quite a bit of research to be done. We will note some of the fundamental results, directing the reader to appropriate references for more detail. The second class, which we call combinatorial tiling substitutions, is sufficiently new that it lacks even an agreed-upon definition. In this class the substitution rule replaces a tile by some configuration of tiles that may not bear any geometric resemblance to the original. The difficulty with such a rule comes when one wishes to iterate it: we need to be sure that the substitution can be applied repeatedly so that all the tiles fit together without gaps or overlaps. The examples we provide are much less well-known (in some cases new) and are ripe for further study. The two classes are related in a subtle and interesting way that is not yet well understood.
1.1. Some history. The study of aperiodic tilings in general, and substitution tilings specifically, comes from the confluence of several discoveries and lines of research. Interest in the subject from a philosophical viewpoint came to the forefront when Wang [60] asked about the decidability of the “tiling problem”: whether a given set of prototiles can form an infinite tiling of the plane. He tied this answer to the existence of “aperiodic prototile sets”: finite sets of tiles that can tile the plane, but only nonperiodically. He saw that the problem is undecidable if an aperiodic prototile set exists. Berger [4] was the first to find an aperiodic prototile set and was followed by many others, including Penrose. It turned out that one way prove a prototile set is aperiodic involves showing that every tiling formed by the prototile set is self-similar.
Independently, work was proceeding on one-dimensional symbolic substitution systems, a combination of dynamical systems and theoretical computer science. Symbolic dynamical systems had become of interest due to their utility in coding more complex dynamical systems, and great progress was being made in our understanding of these systems. Queffelec [44] summarized what was known about the ergodic and spectral theory of substitution systems, while a more recent survey of the state of the art appears in [43]. Substitution tilings can be seen as a natural extension of this branch of dynamical systems; insight and proof techniques can often be borrowed for use in the tiling situation. We will use symbolic substitutions motivate our study in the next section.
From the world of physics, a major breakthrough was made in 1984 by Schechtman et. al. [54] with the discovery of a metal alloy that, by rights, should have crystalline since its x-ray spectrum was diffractive. However, the diffraction pattern had five-fold rotational symmetry, which is not allowed for ideal crystals! This type of matter has been termed “quasicrystalline”, and self-similar tilings like the Penrose tiling, having the right combination of aperiodicity and long-range order, were immediately recognized as valid mathematical models. Dynamical systems entered the picture, and it was realized that the spectrum of a tiling dynamical system is closely related to the diffraction spectrum of the solid it models [10,24]. Thus we find several points of departure for the study of substitution tilings and their dynamical systems. 1.2. One-dimensional symbolic substitutions. Let A be a finite set called an alphabet, whose elements are called letters. Then A * , the set of all finite words with elements from A, forms a semigroup under concatenation. A symbolic substitution is any map ฯ : A โ A * . A symbolic substitution can be applied to words in A * by concatenating the substitutions of the individual letters. A block of the form ฯ n (a) will be called a level-n block of type a. where we’ve added spaces to emphasize the breaks between substituted blocks. Notice that the block lengths triple when substituted.
Example 2. Again let A = {a, b}; this time let ฯ(a) = ab and ฯ(b) = a. If we begin with a we get: a โ ab โ ab a โ ab a ab โ ab a ab ab a โ ab a ab ab a ab a ab โ โข โข โข Note that in this example block lengths are 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, … , and t
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