Hexagonal Graph Paper

By Michael Hartley

There are three different regular polygons that can tessellate a plane - squares, triangles and hexagons. Of these three tessellations, the one with hexagons is perhaps the most beautiful. It's got all the same lines of symmetry as a tessellation with triangles - in fact, if you take a tessellation with triangles, and join the centres of all the neighboring triangles, you get a tessellation with hexagons. It works the other way round, too - you can get back the original tessellation with triangles by joining together the centres of adjacent hexagons.

Tessellations with hexagons appear in nature. Everyone is familiar with the honeycomb pattern made by bees. Less familiar is a remarkable piece of geology in Ireland called the Giant's Causeway. It's the most popular tourist attraction in Northern Ireland - a plateau of basalt laid down by a long-extinct volcano split into a pretty hexagonal pattern as the lava cooled. The Carbon atoms in sheets of graphite (called graphene sheets) are arranged in this pattern too.

I've made a whole bunch of tessellations of hexagons of different sizes for you to download and print. Choose the size you want, and download and print yourself some hexagonal graph paper using the links below. Each download is just a single page. The size given is the size of the edges of the hexagons.

You could use the hexagonal graph paper to form the basis for an interesting art project. Also, there are a number of games that use hexagonal grids as their game board. One of my favorites is Hex. If you have an interesting use in mind for this graph paper, do let me know. In the meantime, check out the other graph paper I've also made available.