Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 “Dat Pussle”
- 2 Our Geometric Universe
- 3 Fearful Symmetry
- 4 It's Hip to Be a Square
- 5 Triangles and Friends
- 6 All Polygons Created Equal
- 7 First Steps
- 8 Step Right Up!
- 9 Watch Your Step!
- 10 Just Tessellating
- 11 Plain Out-Stripped
- 12 Strips Teased
- 13 Tessellations Completed
- 14 Maltese Crosses
- 15 Curves Ahead
- 16 Stardom
- 17 Farewell, My Lindgren
- 18 The New Breed
- 19 When Polygons Aren't Regular
- 20 On to Solids
- 21 Cubes Rationalized
- 22 Prisms Reformed
- 23 Cheated, Bamboozled, and Hornswoggled
- 24 Solutions to All Our Problems
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index of Dissections
- General Index
17 - Farewell, My Lindgren
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 “Dat Pussle”
- 2 Our Geometric Universe
- 3 Fearful Symmetry
- 4 It's Hip to Be a Square
- 5 Triangles and Friends
- 6 All Polygons Created Equal
- 7 First Steps
- 8 Step Right Up!
- 9 Watch Your Step!
- 10 Just Tessellating
- 11 Plain Out-Stripped
- 12 Strips Teased
- 13 Tessellations Completed
- 14 Maltese Crosses
- 15 Curves Ahead
- 16 Stardom
- 17 Farewell, My Lindgren
- 18 The New Breed
- 19 When Polygons Aren't Regular
- 20 On to Solids
- 21 Cubes Rationalized
- 22 Prisms Reformed
- 23 Cheated, Bamboozled, and Hornswoggled
- 24 Solutions to All Our Problems
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index of Dissections
- General Index
Summary
“Concerning Freese's work, have you tried a letter to the mayor of Los Angeles, saying that from the bits of this work that you have seen, it would really be a great loss to the mathematical world were this outstanding work to be irretrievably lost to posterity? As far as I can see, it could not do any harm, and if you also rub in about the glory of the citizens of his illustrious city, it might produce results.”
So is this the MacGuffin of a fast-paced melodrama? The product of a Hollywood script-writer's overactive imagination, destined to launch the career of a mathematical Philip Marlowe, to inaugurate a furious search across three continents, and to lay bare the power politics of a sprawling megalopolitan region?…
[with apologies to Raymond Chandler]
The trail was as cold as the Minnesota tundra that Ernest Irving Freese had fled so many years before. The faded letter from C. Dudley Langford to Harry Lindgren had a 1964 date. It outlined a strategy to obtain the Los Angeles architect's magnum opus on geometric dissections – a strategy as hopeless as announcing that all the sunbaked jurisdictions in Southern California should assemble into one coherent whole. Lindgren had never persuaded Freese's widow to share the manuscript with him. And Freese's blueprints, reportedly containing some 200 plates with over 400 figures, were certainly not on file at City Hall.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- DissectionsPlane and Fancy, pp. 187 - 206Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997