tessellation

noun

tes·​sel·​la·​tion ˌte-sə-ˈlā-shən 

1

a

: mosaic

b

: a covering of an infinite geometric plane without gaps or overlaps by congruent plane figures of one type or a few types

2

: an act of tessellating : the state of being tessellated

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

Closerie Falbala was made to energise, and stepping inside feels like being within an ornament, a tender space, Logological Cabinet, was meant to be an intense experience, painted in his L'Hourloupe style from floor to ceiling in swirling tessellations. —Grace Banks, Forbes, 22 Mar. 2023

The path of the International Space Station, as mapped over a tessellation of Narukawa's world map. —Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 29 Nov. 2022

The true impact of roads seems to be the gradual tessellation of once-cohesive landscapes. —Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 19 Dec. 2016

Both exercise graphics and compute shaders, but one focuses on hardware tessellation and the other on the OpenGL application programming interface (API). —Brian Westover, PCMAG, 8 July 2022

Keller’s conjecture, a tessellation problem about the way certain shapes tile in certain spaces, has been solved for all but seven-dimensional space. —Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 31 Aug. 2020

In the cases Wiles studied, the tiling might be something along the lines of M.C. Escher’s famous tessellations of a disk with fish or angels and devils that get smaller near the boundary. —Quanta Magazine, 6 Apr. 2020

As one journey — the classification of all convex polygon tessellations — ends, another is just beginning. —Quanta Magazine, 11 July 2017

An example is the tessellation of a strange, multipronged shape called the Taylor-Socolar tile, discovered by the Australian amateur mathematician Joan Taylor in the 1990s, and analyzed in detail with Joshua Socolar of Duke University in 2010. —Quanta Magazine, 14 May 2018

See More

Word History

First Known Use

1660, in the meaning defined at sense 1a