May 18, 2011 15:21 WSPC/S0218-1967 132-IJAC S0218196711006248 International Journal of Algebra and Computation Vol. 21, No. 3 (2011) 387–408 c World Scientific Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S0218196711006248 DYADIC POLYGONS∗ K. MATCZAK Faculty of Civil Engineering, Mechanics and Petrochemistry in Plock Warsaw University of Technology 09-400 Plock, Poland
[email protected] A. B. ROMANOWSKA Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science Warsaw University of Technology 00-661 Warsaw, Poland
[email protected] J. D. H. SMITH Department of Mathematics Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, 50011, USA
[email protected] Received 20 November 2009 Revised 26 August 2010 Communicated by R. McKenzie Dyadic rationals are rationals whose denominator is a power of 2. Dyadic triangles and dyadic polygons are, respectively, defined as the intersections with the dyadic plane of a triangle or polygon in the real plane whose vertices lie in the dyadic plane. The one-dimensional analogs are dyadic intervals. Algebraically, dyadic polygons carry the structure of a commutative, entropic and idempotent algebra under the binary operation of arithmetic mean. In this paper, dyadic intervals and triangles are classified to within affine or algebraic isomorphism, and dyadic polygons are shown to be finitely generated as algebras. The auxiliary results include a form of Pythagoras’ theorem for dyadic affine geometry. Keywords: Affine space; convex set; polygon; polytope; commutative; binary; entropic mode; arithmetic mean. Mathematics Subject Classification: 20N02, 52C05 ∗Research was supported by the Warsaw University of Technology under grant number 504G/1120/0054/000. Part of the work on this paper was completed during several visits of the second author to Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.