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Hole dissections for planar figures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2021

Greg N. Frederickson
Greg N. Frederickson*
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA e-mail:gnf@purdue.edu

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A geometric dissection is a cutting of a geometric figure (or a finite set of figures) into pieces that we can rearrange to form another geometric figure (or finite set of figures). If our figures are required to be polygons, then there is always a dissection that has just a finite number of pieces. This was established by John Lowry [1], William Wallace [2], Farkas Bolyai [3], and Karl Gerwien [4]. The American Sam Loyd [5] and the Englishman Henry Ernest Dudeney [6, 7] emphasised the goal of minimising the number of pieces that resulted from such a standard dissection.

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Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 105 , Issue 563 , July 2021, pp. 237 - 244
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Copyright
© Mathematical Association 2021

References

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