In the Media

Prof. Erik Demaine and his colleagues have solved a longstanding mathematical puzzle called “Dudeney’s dissection,” which involves dissecting an equilateral triangle into the smallest number of pieces that could be rearranged into a square, reports Lyndie Chiou for Scientific American. “Each of those pieces could have arbitrarily many edges to it, and the coordinates of those cuts start at arbitrary points,” says Demaine, of what makes the puzzle so challenging. “You have these continuous parameters where there’s lots and lots of infinities of possible choices that makes it so annoyingly hard. You can’t just brute-force it with a computer.”