[dvanduzer]

See sibling post for links, but the short answer: you can use 12 pentagons, strategically interspersed. Like a (soccer) football.

edit: Oops, that only explains the tiling. For explanations of how the hierarchy descends, Dr. Sahr produced some GIFs that give a little bit of an overview of how the resolutions overlay: http://webpages.sou.edu/~sahrk/dgg/images/topogif/topogif.ht...

[scdoshi]

Thanks for that link.

Also found this which goes into some more detailed comparison with rectangular grids:

https://github.com/uber/h3/blob/master/docs/doxyfiles/usecas...