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Gruber P. Convex and Discrete Geometry

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464 <strong>Geometry</strong> of Numbers<br />

econometry, geography, sociology, biology, microbiology, metallurgy, crystallography,<br />

data transmission <strong>and</strong> other fields. This is expressed, for example, by Tanemura<br />

[988]:<br />

... usefulness of the concept of Voronoĭ tessellation is three-fold. Firstly, the Voronoĭ<br />

tessellation can be one of the ways of describing the manner of a spatial distribution<br />

of particles. ... Secondly, the Voronoĭ tessellation is useful for modeling tiling patterns<br />

which are observed in nature. ... Thirdly, the Voronoĭ tessellation can be used<br />

as a tool for reducing the load of computation.<br />

After stating basic definitions, we describe, in this section, Dirichlet–Voronoĭ<br />

tilings <strong>and</strong> Delone triangulations <strong>and</strong> show that locally finite facet-to-facet tilings<br />

give rise to polyhedral complexes. Finally, a bound, due to Minkowski, for the number<br />

of facets of a lattice tile is given.<br />

The tilings that will be considered are all locally finite, i.e. any bounded set in E d<br />

meets only finitely many tiles. Tilings which are not locally finite <strong>and</strong>, in particular,<br />

such tilings in infinite dimensional normed spaces may have completely unexpected<br />

properties. For some results <strong>and</strong> references to the literature, see, e.g. Klee, Maluta<br />

<strong>and</strong> Zanco [596], Klee [594] <strong>and</strong> <strong>Gruber</strong> [432].<br />

The reader who wants to know more on tilings in the context of Dirichlet–<br />

Voronoĭ <strong>and</strong> Delone tilings may consult the books of Møller [749], Engel <strong>and</strong> Syta<br />

[302] <strong>and</strong> Okabe, Boots, Sugihara <strong>and</strong> Chiu [777] <strong>and</strong> the surveys of Fortune [341]<br />

<strong>and</strong> Aurenhammer <strong>and</strong> Klein [42].<br />

Tiling with <strong>Convex</strong> Bodies<br />

A family of proper convex or unbounded proper convex bodies in E d is a (convex)<br />

tiling if it is both a packing <strong>and</strong> a covering. The bodies are called tiles. We will consider<br />

mainly, but not exclusively, tilings which consist of lattice translates, translates,<br />

or congruent copies of a given convex body P. These tilings are called lattice tilings,<br />

translative tilings <strong>and</strong> tilings of congruent copies of P. The convex body P then is<br />

a convex polytope as will be shown in this section. It is called the prototile of the<br />

tiling. The prototile of a lattice tiling is called a parallelohedron. Particular tilings of<br />

congruent copies of P are those where the tiles are the images of P under the rigid<br />

motions of a crystallographic group. If this is the case, P is a stereohedron. A tiling<br />

is facet-to-facet if, for any two tiles with (d − 1)-dimensional intersection, the intersection<br />

is a facet of both of them. It is face-to-face, if the intersection of any two tiles<br />

is a face of both of them.<br />

Dirichlet–Voronoĭ Tilings<br />

Dirichlet [272] first introduced tilings of the following form, where L is a lattice<br />

in E d :<br />

{P + l : l ∈ L}, P = � x :�x� ≤�x − m� for all m ∈ L � .

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