Tiling the plane with equilateral triangles

Abstract

Let $\cal T$ be a tiling of the plane with equilateral triangles no two of which share a side. We prove that if the side lengths of the triangles are bounded from below by a positive constant, then $\cal T$ is periodic and it consists of translates of only at most three different triangles. As a corollary, we prove a theorem of Scherer and answer a question of Nandakumar. The same result has been obtained independently by Richter and Wirth.