Signed shape tilings of squares

Kevin Keating

Published 1998-09-21, updated 1999-03-09Version 2

Let T be a tile in the Cartesian plane made up of finitely many rectangles whose corners have rational coordinates and whose sides are parallel to the coordinate axes. This paper gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a square to be tilable by finitely many \Q-weighted tiles with the same shape as T, and necessary and sufficient conditions for a square to be tilable by finitely many \Z-weighted tiles with the same shape as T. The main tool we use is a variant of F. W. Barnes's algebraic theory of brick packing, which converts tiling problems into problems in commutative algebra.