-Titile: Tilings and unfoldings
-Biograpy : Stefan Langerman obtained his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2001.
In 2002 he joined the Computer Science Department at the Université
Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium where he is currently Associate
Professor and Research Director for the F.R.S.-FNRS. His main research
interests are in Discrete and Computational Geometry, Algorithms and
Data Structures.
-Abstract:A tiling is a covering of the plane with copies of a geometric shape
(tiles) without gaps or overlaps.
An unfolding is obtained by cutting along the surface of a polyhedron
through all its vertices, and opening all the dihedral angles between adjacent
faces to obtain a single flat non-overlapping geometric shape.
In this hands-on talk, I will explore connections between these two
fascinating concepts, in an attempt to shed some light on the following
still unsolved algorithmic problem:
How easy (or hard) is it to determine if a given geometric shape can
tile the plane?
and the following more artistic and no less fundamental problem:
How to create beautiful (or even ugly) tilings?