Bridged Polytans





2018/11/06


Isosceles rectangular triangles joined at their sides are called Polytans or Polyabolos. If connection at the corners are also allowed we have pseudo polytans. To get real pieces the connection between the corners must be made by little bridges and the other corners must be rounded to allow the bridges to pass between them. Therefore these pieces are called bridged or rounded polytans.
If all touching corners were bridged, we would get too many pieces with holes. Therefore it seems to be better to remove unneccessary bridges. From the pseudo tritan in the picture you can derive two two-sided bridged tritans and three one-sided bridged tritans.



The left bridges must produce a spanning tree with ordinary polytans as vertices. In the example the vertices are single triangles.
I learned about the concept from the Logelium site more than a decade ago and wrote a program to create the pieces. My counts were:

Number of Triangles 1 2 3 4 5 6
Two-sided pseudo pieces 1 10 91 1432 23547 416177
Two-sided bridged pieces 1 10 95 1574 27553 517828
One-side pseudo pieces 1 15 171 2799 46933
One-sided bridged pieces 1 15 179 3083 54948


The program also provided SVG-files for the shapes and I used them to order laser cut one-sided bridged ditans from 6mm acrylic. A figure with this set is shown above.
At the Logelium site some bridged tritans were missing and I looked for constructions with the complete set of 95 pieces. I found solutions for 12x12 squares with a tritan hole inside but afterwards I stopped exploring the set, because laser cutting all pieces seemed to be too expensive. A decade later I produced the pieces with a 3d-printer and digged out the old program to search for more constructions. One of the old solutions is shown below, for others ones click the sets in the table.

Set Number of Triangles Number of Pieces Total Area Constructions
Bridged Ditans
(two-sided) 		2 10 10 some 3-fold replicas with one piece left;
some tetromino replicas with two pieces left
Bridged Ditans
(one-sided)		 2 15 15 lots of symmetric figures
Bridged Tritans
(two-sided) 		3 95 142.5 12x12 square with tritan hole;
convex symmetric polygons with up to 8 corners;
similar hole triangle
Bridged Tritans
(one-sided)		 3 179 268.5 convex symmetric polygons with up to 8 corners
Bridged Polytans of Order 1..3
(two-sided) 		1..3 106 153 figures with two axes of symmetry;
two simultaneous replicas
Bridged Polytans of Order 1..3
(one-sided)		 1..3 195 284 two congruent figures or one similar one






Home