A tiling of the plane is a collection of subsets called tiles… but what exactly is a tile? If we restrict ourselves to the paving stones still occasionally found in our city streets, they are roughly rectangular. A collection of tiles covers a region of the plane if their union equals that region and the intersection of any two of them lies within their boundaries. The idea extends to polygons, whether convex or not, and then to regions bounded by more sophisticated curves.
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An example of tiling a square using rectangles. A tiling of the plane with

a square using rectangles. regular hexagons.