Tegula – exploring a galaxy of two-dimensional periodic tilings

Abstract Periodic tilings play a role in the decorative arts, in construction and in crystal structures. Combinatorial tiling theory allows the systematic generation, visualization and exploration of such tilings of the plane, sphere and hyperbolic plane, using advanced algorithms and software. Here we present a “galaxy” of tilings that consists of the set of all 2.4 billion different types of periodic tilings that have Dress complexity up to 24. We make these available in a database and provide a new program called Tegula that can be used to search and visualize such tilings.