rectangles

They’re built with alternating (what I call) h-lines and v-lines. An h-line consists of four squares, two on either side of a horizontal line, with equal sums a+b=c+d and aligned edges. The tesselation is first written in digits on a square grid marked with lines like a wire screen door, then constructed by drawing any h- or v-line from the grid and working outwards from there.

Start with any h-line: e.g. 3+4=2+5:

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Extend the arithmetic progressions along the diagonals:

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Then fill in a diagonal next to one of these 2, with any arithmetic progression. e.g:

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All the empty squares have now been determined and can be filled in, making the sums a+b=c+d equal across all line segments (the h-lines and v-lines).
Then when drawing the tesselation, draw the squares of negative size on the other side of the line from where they ‘should’ be, e.g. 2+5=10-3:

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It seems that any grid of numbers constructed this way makes a tesselation of the plane.

Also, it seems that all the 0-sized squares (I mark them with a small circle) lie in a straight line in the tesselation, no matter what sequences are used. I’m sure there’s an obvious reason for that!

The square packings I found a few years ago are each a subset area of one of these tesselations, where there’s only 1 of each sized square.

[Dec 2016]


Jan 2017: Ed Pegg gave me the great idea of using complex numbers for rectangles! So trying the same thing but with rectangles… a+bi with (obviously) a for width, b for height. The real components will have to agree along h-lines, the imaginary along v-lines.
Start ‘as before’ with extending an h-line:

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But now an ‘h-line’ really is a line – there’s nothing to draw yet; we’ve only added widths. Even after adding an arbitrary diagonal of heights/imaginary numbers..

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..there’s still nothing much to draw. So let’s add two more diagonals – an integer one through the 5, and a totally arbitrary imaginary one in the same squares..uh, rectangles.

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