How few $(42^\circ,60^\circ,78^\circ)$ triangles can a regular hexagon be divided into?

137 Views Asked by At

While working on an answer to this excellent post by Edward H. on dissections of an equilateral triangle into similar triangles with angles of $42^\circ, 60^\circ,$ and $78^\circ$, I wondered about a related question: what if we instead try to tile a regular hexagon?

Obviously, any solution for the triangle with $k$ tiles gives a solution of size $6k$. However, we can do much better than this.

At the moment, the best solution I know of makes uses of a shape first discovered by Anders Kaseorg while working on the triangular case, namely that of a $60^\circ-120^\circ$ rhombus constructed from 72 tiles:

enter image description here

Putting three of these parallelograms together yields a hexagon with $\textbf{216}$ triangles.

However, I think it may well be possible to do substantially better than this. I tried a few methods and haven't yet been able to beat $216$, but just to demonstrate that arrangements of similar size can be achieved with more asymmetric configurations, here is a $274$-triangle arrangement I found:

enter image description here

It seems quite plausible to me that more clever arrangements of triangles could get below $216$, perhaps substantially so.

I highly recommend reading the previous question and its answers for useful background information and construction strategies before embarking on this problem.