Kite (geometry) - Tilings and Polyhedra

Tilings and Polyhedra

All kites tile the plane by repeated inversion around the midpoints of their edges, as do more generally all quadrilaterals. A kite with angles π/3, π/2, 2π/3, π/2 can also tile the plane by repeated reflection across its edges; the resulting tessellation, the deltoidal trihexagonal tiling, superposes a tessellation of the plane by regular hexagons and isosceles triangles.

The deltoidal icositetrahedron, deltoidal hexecontahedron, and trapezohedron are polyhedra with congruent kite-shaped facets. There are an infinite number of uniform tilings of the hyperbolic plane by kites, the simplest of which is the deltoidal triheptagonal tiling.

Kites and darts in which the two isosceles triangles forming the kite have apex angles of 2π/5 and 4π/5 represent one of two sets of essential tiles in the Penrose tiling, an aperiodic tiling of the plane discovered by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.