| Sébastien Truchet | |
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Sébastien Truchet
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| Born | 1657 Lyon, France |
| Died | February 05, 1729 France |
| Nationality | France |
| Fields | Mathematician, hydraulics, graphics and typography |
| Institutions | France under Louis XIV |
| Known for | Proportion of typefaces, plane tiling, sundials, channels, weapons |
| Influenced | Pierre Simon Fournier, Didot, Giovanni Battista Bodoni |
Sébastien Truchet (1657 - February 5, 1729) was an eclectic Dominican Father born in Lyon and lived in Louis XIV times. He is known for being active in areas such as mathematics, hydraulics, graphics, typography, and for many inventions.
As typographer he studied for the Description des Métiers[1] the proportions of typefaces of "Roman Du Roi" character (also known as Grandjean character), from which descends directly the "Times New Roman" and which inspired Pierre Simon Fournier, the Didot and Giovanni Battista Bodoni. It was the first scientific work on typefaces, and on this work is based the concept of typographic point (whose first definition is due to French typographer Pierre Simon Fournier in year 1737). As hydraulics expert he designed most of French channels. As inventor he is known for sundials, weapons and tools for transplanting large trees within the Versailles gardens. As mathematician and designer he worked on plane coverage using tileable elements.
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His work on plane coverage used a single tile that could be rotated in the four main directions. An example of Truchet tiles:
Some examples of surface filling made tiling such a pattern.
With a scheme:
With random placement:
From a mathematical point of view this is the central theme. From an artistic point of view if we change the basic shape to a more complex one, we can get very nice combinations. For example, using the following pattern or its inverse:
We have such a tiling:
The lines in this pattern are used in the proof that certain types of Langton's ant will always walk on symmetrical paths.
Fournier resumed Truchet work and proposed alternative patterns:
With Fournier pattern we obtain:
As a curiosity we remember that a simple maze could be generated tiling a white square with a black diagonal:
Truchet tilings are used for walls, floors, marquetry, rear of Tarotées, wallpapers and other contexts. Many software programs generate random plane coverage with such a tiling, and some board games are based on this fascinating part of Truchet work.