Related papers: Dudeney's Dissection is Optimal
What is the smallest number of pieces that you can cut an n-sided regular polygon into so that the pieces can be rearranged to form a rectangle? Call it r(n). The rectangle may have any proportions you wish, as long as it is a rectangle.…
There is well-known problem of geometric probability which can be quote as the Broken Spaghetti Problem. It addresses the following question: A stick of spaghetti breaks into three parts and all points of the stick have the same probability…
Monsky proved that a square cannot be dissected into an odd number of triangles of equal area. Stein conjectured that the same holds for any polygon whose edges can be paired into parallel and equal-length segments. We prove Stein's…
We study the problems of covering or partitioning a polygon $P$ (possibly with holes) using a minimum number of small pieces, where a small piece is a connected sub-polygon contained in an axis-aligned unit square. For covering, we seek to…
An equilateral triangle cannot be dissected into finitely many mutually incongruent equilateral triangles [Tutte 1948]. Therefore Tuza [Tuza 1991] asked for the largest number $s=s(n)$ such that there is a tiling of an equilateral triangle…
We consider the classic problem of fairly dividing a heterogeneous good ("cake") among several agents with different valuations. Classic cake-cutting procedures either allocate each agent a collection of disconnected pieces, or assume that…
We provide a remarkably simple algorithm to compute all (at most four) common tangents of two disjoint simple polygons. Given each polygon as a read-only array of its corners in cyclic order, the algorithm runs in linear time and constant…
A typical decomposition question asks whether the edges of some graph $G$ can be partitioned into disjoint copies of another graph $H$. One of the oldest and best known conjectures in this area, posed by Ringel in 1963, concerns the…
We consider the classical minimum and maximum cut problems: find a partition of vertices of a graph into two disjoint subsets that minimize or maximize the sum of the weights of edges with endpoints in different subsets. It is known that if…
Divide and Conquer is a well known algorithmic procedure for solving many kinds of problem. In this procedure, the problem is partitioned into two parts until the problem is trivially solvable. Finding the distance of the closest pair is an…
The $n$-cube is the poset obtained by ordering all subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ by inclusion, and it can be partitioned into $\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}$ chains, which is the minimum possible number. Two such decompositions of the…
Inspired by a chessboard puzzle of Dudeney, the general position problem in graph theory asks for a largest set $S$ of vertices in a graph such that no three elements of $S$ lie on a common shortest path. The number of vertices in such a…
Euler explored the problem of finding three numbers such that the sum or difference of any two of them is a perfect square. He discovered a parametric solution represented by polynomials of degree 18 and identified the smallest of these…
This paper deals with the history of the following problem: "Can an arbitrary rectangle be dissected into 3 non-rectangular congruent regions?" We present a new elementary proof that the answer is indeed no.
The Dulmage--Mendelsohn decomposition (or the DM-decomposition) gives a unique partition of the vertex set of a bipartite graph reflecting the structure of all the maximum matchings therein. A bipartite graph is said to be DM-irreducible if…
An elementary geometric construction known as Napoleon's theorem produces an equilateral triangle built on the sides of any initial triangle: the centroids of each equilateral triangle meeting the original sides, all outward or all inward,…
This paper addresses the problem of reassembling images from disjointed fragments. More specifically, given an unordered set of fragments, we aim at reassembling one or several possibly incomplete images. The main contributions of this work…
Delaunay triangulations of a point set in the Euclidean plane are ubiquitous in a number of computational sciences, including computational geometry. Delaunay triangulations are not well defined as soon as 4 or more points are concyclic but…
In this work we study inside-out dissections of polygons and polyhedra. We first show that an arbitrary polygon can be inside-out dissected with $2n+1$ pieces, thereby improving the best previous upper bound of $4(n-2)$ pieces.…
We study the problem of partitioning a given simple polygon $P$ into a minimum number of connected polygonal pieces, each of bounded size. We describe a general technique for constructing such partitions that works for several notions of…