Mathematically, tessellations can be extended to spaces other than the Euclidean plane. The Swiss geometer Ludwig Schläfli pioneered this by defining polyschemes, which mathematicians nowadays call polytopes. These are the analogues to polygons and polyhedra in spaces with more dimensions. He further defined the Schläfli symbol notation to make it easy to describe polytopes. For example, the Schläfli symbol for an equilateral triangle is {3}, while that for a square is {4}. The Schläfli notation makes it possible to describe tilings compactly. For example, a tiling of regular hexagons has three six-sided polygons at each vertex, so its Schläfli symbol is {6,3}.