The fibres of the Scott map on polygon tilings are the flip equivalence classes

Abstract

We associate strand diagrams to tilings of surfaces with marked points, generalising Scott's method for triangulations of polygons. We thus obtain a map from tilings of surfaces to permutations of the marked points on boundary components, the {\em Scott map}. In the disk case (polygon tilings) we prove that the fibres of the Scott map are the flip equivalence classes. The result allows us to consider the size of the image as a generalisation of a classical combinatorial problem, and hence to determine the size in low ranks.