Learning about tiling pentagons from Laura Taalman and Evelyn Lamb

Last week we did made cookies using Laura Taalman’s tiling pentagon cookie cutters:

You can find Taalman’s program here:

Print all the pentagons! 3D print every known convex tessellating pentagon @Thingiverse: http://t.co/vOHqnv3Ukl pic.twitter.com/VtdyMnla6m

— Laura Taalman (@mathgrrl) September 11, 2015

and our project is here:

Tiling pentagon cookies

During the project my younger son found a different tiling pattern for pentagon #10 than the one in Taalman’s program. I suspected that the tiling pattern actually related to Pentagon #1 but wasn’t sure.

When the 15th tiling pentagon was discovered last year Evelyn Lamb wrote this great article which mentioned that each pentagon was actually part of an infinite family of tiling pentagons:

There’s something about pentagons by Evelyn Lamb

Tonight I used Taalman’s program to show my younger son how to make his tiling pattern from pentagon #1.

First I had him recreate the two tiling patterns:

Next we used the amazing functionality in Taalman’s tiling pentagon program to find this tiling pattern in pentagon #1:

So, thanks to Laura Taalman and Evelyn Lamb for teaching us something about tiling pentagons tonight!

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