tessellate
/ˈtɛsəleɪt
/(US also tesselate)
verb [with object]
1 (often as adjective tessellated) Decorate (a floor or pavement) with mosaics.The nature of their decoration, whether by painted plaster on walls or ceilings, or by tessellated and mosaic floors, compares well with that from the countryside....
- One room had a red tessellated floor and the main reception room a geometric mosaic, partly restored.
- Remains from Roman Canterbury have also come to light, including walls standing two feet high, metalled roads, a number of tessellated floors, and a hoard of about 700 low-denomination coins spanning the 1st - 4th centuries.
2Cover (a plane surface) by repeated use of a single shape, without gaps or overlapping.By considering the action of the modular group on the complex plane, Klein showed that the fundamental region is moved around to tessellate the plane....
- Does there exist an algorithm or standard procedure that can take as input an arbitrary single tile and determine in a finite number of steps whether or not that tile tessellates the plane?
- Furthermore individual tracheids within these anomalous wood zones often possess a rounded cross-sectional shape, such that they do not perfectly tessellate, resulting in the occurrence of abundant intercellular spaces.
Origin
Late 17th century (as tessellated): from late Latin tessellat-, from the verb tessellare, from tessella, diminutive of tessera (see tessera).