Separating circles on the sphere by polygonal tilings

Abstract

We say that a tiling separates discs of a packing in the Euclidean plane, if each tile contains exactly one member of the packing. It is a known elementary geometric problem to show that for each locally finite packing of circular discs, there exists a separating tiling with convex polygons. In this paper we show that this separating property remains true for circle packings on the sphere and in the hyperbolic plane. Moreover, we show that in the Euclidean plane circles are the only convex discs, whose packings with similar copies can be always separated by polygonal tilings. The analogous statement is not true on the sphere and it is not known in the hyperbolic plane.