Domino tiling
In geometry, a domino tiling of a region in the Euclidean plane is a tessellation of the region by dominoes, shapes formed by the union of two unit squares meeting edge-to-edge. Equivalently, it is a perfect matching in the grid graph formed by placing a vertex at the center of each square of the region and connecting two vertices when they correspond to adjacent squares.
Height functions
For some classes of tilings on a regular grid in two dimensions, it is possible to define a height function associating an integer to the vertices of the grid. For instance, draw a chessboard, fix a node with height 0, then for any node there is a path from to it. On this path define the height of each node to be the height of the previous node plus one if the square on the right of the path from to is black, and minus one otherwise.More details can be found in.
Thurston's height condition
describes a test for determining whether a simply-connected region, formed as the union of unit squares in the plane, has a domino tiling. He forms an undirected graph that has as its vertices the points in the three-dimensional integer lattice, where each such point is connected to four neighbors: if x + y is even, then is connected to,,, and, while if x + y is odd, then is connected to,,, and. The boundary of the region, viewed as a sequence of integer points in the plane, lifts uniquely to a path in this three-dimensional graph. A necessary condition for this region to be tileable is that this path must close up to form a simple closed curve in three dimensions, however, this condition is not sufficient. Using more careful analysis of the boundary path, Thurston gave a criterion for tileability of a region that was sufficient as well as necessary.Counting tilings of regions
The number of ways to cover an rectangle with dominoes, calculated independently by and, is given by.
When both m and n are odd, the formula correctly reduces to zero possible domino tilings.
A special case occurs when tiling the rectangle with n dominoes: the sequence reduces to the Fibonacci sequence.
Another special case happens for squares with m = n = 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12,... is
These numbers can be found by writing them as the Pfaffian of an skew-symmetric matrix whose eigenvalues can be found explicitly. This technique may be applied in many mathematics-related subjects, for example, in the classical, 2-dimensional computation of the dimer-dimer correlator function in statistical mechanics.
The number of tilings of a region is very sensitive to boundary conditions, and can change dramatically with apparently insignificant changes in the shape of the region. This is illustrated by the number of tilings of an Aztec diamond of order n, where the number of tilings is 2n/2. If this is replaced by the "augmented Aztec diamond" of order n with 3 long rows in the middle rather than 2, the number of tilings drops to the much smaller number D, a Delannoy number, which has only exponential rather than super-exponential growth in n. For the "reduced Aztec diamond" of order n with only one long middle row, there is only one tiling.