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Iterated Voronoi diagrams of Penrose Tilings

Posted: December 29th, 2025, 6:25 pm
by pcallahan
Penrose tilings (either rhombs or kites and darts) are angular and in my opinion not that aesthetically pleasing aside from mathematical interest. That's a personal preference, and I know they have been used decoratively to great effect.

By contrast, the Voronoi diagram of the vertices has a natural look. It could be cells in tissue, sunflower seeds, or a cobblestone pavement. After making a Voronoi diagram of a Penrose rhomb tiling, I wondered if the process could be iterated. I.e., take the vertices of the last tessellation and construct its Voronoi diagram.

I don't think the results improve beyond the second case, but I'm posting here anyone is curious. I'll follow up with three more after this. Note that some tessellations have stable oscillations, like a square or hex/triangle mesh. I was hoping for something similar but what I realized is that as the cells grow irregular in shape, we get clusters of internal vertices that are close but not identical.

The original rhomb tiling.
rhomb.png
rhomb.png (386.71 KiB) Viewed 193 times
The Voronoi diagram of its vertices.
voronoi1.png
voronoi1.png (441.12 KiB) Viewed 193 times
The Voronoi diagram of the vertices of the Voronoi diagram.
voronoi2.png
voronoi2.png (616.79 KiB) Viewed 193 times

Re: Iterated Voronoi diagrams of Penrose Tilings

Posted: December 29th, 2025, 6:30 pm
by pcallahan
It gets more complicated in successive iterations and less practical as a tiling. You can see that the cells break up into slivers and the size is increasingly non-uniform. I am actually starting to like these as I look at them, but the first Voronoi is the one I like best. It breaks up the plane into 7 distinct shapes, all of them reasonably compact.
voronoi3.png
voronoi3.png (704.39 KiB) Viewed 192 times
voronoi4.png
voronoi4.png (925.33 KiB) Viewed 192 times
voronoi5.png
voronoi5.png (1.12 MiB) Viewed 192 times