Show HN: Explore tilings of the hyperbolic plane by moving the mouse

github.com

46 points·tim_hutton··10 comments

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This reminds me of Roger Penrose's spacetime diagrams.

http://copaseticflow.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/nine-notes-about...

Mesmerizing. I wish I could stop the spinning though.

Sure. Download the index.html and run it locally. Comment out line 259: //setInterval( animate, 20 );

in the inspector,

> for (var i=1; i<99999; i++) clearInterval(i);

or, in this case,

> clearInterval(1);

works

I appreciated the "what the heck am I looking at?" section. Very smooth.

So, I can only create perfect solids with some numbers of sides (3 and 5). Why is that? Some symmetry caused by having 3 dimensions?

Don't forget the cube with quadratic sides. In general these are called platonic solids [1] and there are only 5 of them. Why only 5 ? It has to do with angles and how you can unfold such a solid. (so it's somewhat caused by getting something from 3d-space into the 2d-plane)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid

Also, it's not just about the angles. It's about the number of connections between vertices too. There just aren't any other solutions.

To convince yourself, here's a fun game you can try with pencil and paper: http://ferkeltongs.livejournal.com/28364.html (disclosure: that's my blog)

I feel bad for the poor heptagon, which has neither a flat tiling nor a solid. At least on the hyperbolic plane everyone gets to take part in a tiling.

Very nice!

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