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18 - The New Breed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Greg N. Frederickson
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
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Summary

Three fat folders lie on the desk. Within each is a series of enthusiastic letters accompanied by a stack of remarkable diagrams. First is the correspondence from a nowdeceased Englishman, second is that from an expatriate Hungarian, and the third is from an expatriate Englishman. Together, these dog-eared and annotated sheets document the origins of a new type of dissection. It has been a wonderful experience to receive these letters, overflowing with new dissections, new ideas, written by new people. They tell the story of expanded boundaries, not merely of countries, not only of dissections, but also of human possibilities. A memorable record, in three fat folders.

The folders are for Stuart Elliott, Alfred Varsady, and Robert Reid; the first two reach back to the late 1970s, and the last commences with a decade-old letter to Martin Gardner. These manila cornucopias chronicle the development of new types of dissections by people who passionately mapped the new terrain. Elliott led off with dissections based on combinations of the relationships discussed in the last two chapters. Soon after, Varsady developed a system of relationships based on decompositions of figures to half-rhombuses. Finally, Reid was drawn into dissections as he whittled down dramatically the number of pieces in many of Elliott's dissections. These three demonstrated that Harry Iindgren's work on the internal structure of polygons and stars could be pushed in exciting new directions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Dissections
Plane and Fancy
, pp. 207 - 220
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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  • The New Breed
  • Greg N. Frederickson, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: Dissections
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574917.019
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  • The New Breed
  • Greg N. Frederickson, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: Dissections
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574917.019
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The New Breed
  • Greg N. Frederickson, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: Dissections
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574917.019
Available formats
×