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Gruber P. Convex and Discrete Geometry

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32 Tiling with <strong>Convex</strong> Polytopes 467<br />

are called Delone triangulations or Delone tilings. These can be defined by Delone’s<br />

empty sphere method: Consider all Euclidean spheres such that D contains no point<br />

in the interior but d + 1 or more of its points are on the sphere <strong>and</strong> such that these<br />

points are not contained in a hyperplane. For each such empty sphere take the convex<br />

hull of the points of D on it. This gives a proper convex polytope.<br />

Proposition 32.2. Let D be a Delone set. Then the proper convex polytopes obtained<br />

by the empty sphere method form a facet-to-facet tiling of E d .<br />

Proof. We first show the following:<br />

(4) Let P, Q be two distinct convex polytopes obtained by the empty sphere<br />

method. Then int P ∩ int Q =∅.<br />

Let S, T be the corresponding empty spheres. None of these can contain the other<br />

one. If they are disjoint or touch, we are done. If not, they intersect along a common<br />

(d −2)-sphere. The hyperplane H through the latter cuts off from each of the spheres<br />

S, T a spherical cap contained in the interior of the other sphere. Thus none of these<br />

caps can contain a point of D. This shows that H separates the points of D ∩ S from<br />

the points of D ∩ T , which, in turn, implies (4).<br />

Next, we prove the following:<br />

(5) Let P be a polytope obtained by the empty sphere method from D <strong>and</strong> F a<br />

facet of P. Then there is another such polytope which meets P in F.<br />

Let S be the empty sphere corresponding to P. Move the centre of S in the direction<br />

of the exterior normal of F while keeping the vertices of F on the sphere. By the<br />

definition of D, this will eventually lead to an empty sphere T which contains the<br />

vertices of F <strong>and</strong> one or more points of D on the far side of F. The polytope corresponding<br />

to T is the desired polytope which meets P in F.<br />

The last step is to show that the following holds:<br />

(6) The polytopes obtained by the empty sphere method from D cover E d .<br />

Since the centre of an empty sphere has distance at most R from the nearest point<br />

of D, its radius is at most R. Hence each of the polytopes obtained by the empty<br />

sphere method has diameter at most 2R. The vertices of each of these polytopes are<br />

contained in D. Since D is discrete, each bounded set meets only finitely many such<br />

polytopes. If (6) did not hold, connect a point of the complement with a line segment<br />

which avoids all faces of our polytopes of dimension at most d − 2 to a point in<br />

the interior of one of the polytopes. The first point where this line segment meets a<br />

polytope, say P, is an interior point of a facet F of P <strong>and</strong> there is no polytope which<br />

meets P in F. Since this contradicts (5), the proof of (6) is complete.<br />

The proposition now follows from (4) to (6). ⊓⊔<br />

An Alternative way to Construct Dirichlet–Voronoi <strong>and</strong> Delone Tilings<br />

Let D be a general discrete set or a Delone set. Embed E d into E d+1 as usual (first d<br />

coordinates). Consider, in E d+1 , the solid paraboloid

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