[math-fun] Squared Rectangle Puzzles
Rectangles made entirely of squares can be wonderful problems. Bill Gosper: "Search the Web for 'squared rectangles'. If I were king, one of these diagrams (undimensioned) would appear daily in the newspaper puzzle pages." http://tweedledum.com/rwg/rectarith12.pdf http://gosper.org/Googebra.htm (Solving techniques) I made a few thousand puzzles involving Squared Rectangles. In each case, the dissection is "nowhere neat", in that no two squares share a full edge. Also, all of the squares in each dissection have a size less than 100. I give two different types of puzzle for each dissection. http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/MondrianPuzzles/ I also attach a large scale puzzle of this type, as a challenge. The squared rectangle it produces is extremely tiny. I'm willing to bet $20 that an asymmetrical, nowhere-neat, squared rectangle of an equal or smaller size and more squares is impossible. A proof would be straightforward and impossible -- just run Bouwkamp processing on all gajillion planar graphs with 54 to 90 edges. At 35 edges, there are already 5986979643542 planar graphs. http://www.numericana.com/data/polycount.htm More history and solving techniques at http://squaring.net/sq/tws.html --Ed Pegg Jr http://www.mathpuzzle.com/
http://cube20.org/ Morley Davidson, John Dethridge, Herbert Kociemba, and Tomas Rokicki prove that God's Number for the Cube is exactly 20. In other words, any Rubik's cube position can be solved in 20 or fewer moves. --Ed Pegg Jr
http://cube20.org/ Morley Davidson, John Dethridge, Herbert Kociemba, and Tomas Rokicki prove that God's Number for the Cube is exactly 20. In other words, any Rubik's cube position can be solved in 20 or fewer moves. --Ed Pegg Jr
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Ed Pegg Jr